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Copyright & Fair Use for Faculty

Copyright and fair use for education is complicated. Try our interactive tools to find out if the work you want to use is protected under copyright, fair use or educational exceptions.

What You Can Do

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Form the Association of Research Libraries. "ARL has carefully vetted the information in this chart to ensure its accuracy and conformity with well-accepted practices under US law. However, ARL makes no warranty whatsoever in connection with the information and disclaims liability for damages resulting from its use. No legal services are provided or intended to be provided." Get the PDF version from the link below. 

Online is Different Than Face 2 Face

Copyright law considers loading a copy of copyrighted content into Backboard to be fundamentally different to providing a link to the content as you have 1) made a copy of the resource and 2) distributed it. You will generally need to provide a link instead of a copy.

If you do share a copyrighted resource that way, you should check Is it Fair Use? or Is it an Educational Exception?

Make it Easy, Link to Library Content!

If you are using a persistent or durable link to library content, then you are good! It's the easiest way for you to share content and not have to worry about copyright. The responsibility falls on the database provider rather than you.

Not sure how to get a persistent link? We go over it step by step in this guide or you can ask us! 

Creative Commons & Public Domain Content

""COM Library collects links to top publicly accessible content to share with your students. At the very least you should be able to provide links to the content. Get them from the guide below. 

More specific open access sources are also available by subject in all our subject guides.