Copyright Resources: Fair Use

Risk assessment is necessary with any copyrighted material:

Image credit: Figure 14.1. “Gauge Your Risk” stoplight model. Adapted from “Teaching Our Faculty: Developing Copyright and Scholarly Communication Outreach Programs,” by J. Duncan, S. K. Clement, and B. Rozum, 2013, in S. Davis-Kahl and M. K. Hensley (Eds.), Common ground at the nexus of information literacy and scholarly communication, p. 280. Copyright 2013 by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Adapted with permission.

Copyright compliance is your responsibility as a scholar, artist, and/or professional. Use the tools below to help make informed decisions:

  If you are thinking of reusing items from a proprietary database for a public project, check the Terms of Service or the user agreement of the website or database. These agreements often prohibit fair use.

Copyright law provides a classroom exception in Title 17, Section 110(1) that allows instructors to display or show entire copyrighted works during the course of a face-to-face classroom session, as long as certain requirements outlined in the law are met. This exception exists independently of fair use and may be a more applicable option for exposing students to copyrighted material.

The classroom exception does not apply to the reproduction of copyrighted materials. If you are making/distributing copies of a copyrighted work, do a fair use evaluation.

Please keep in mind that this particular exception only applies to face-to-face instruction. Separate rules apply for material posted online for courses, whether the class meets in person frequently, occasionally, or only online. Information regarding fair use for electronic course reserves is directly below.

Electronic reserves (Ares) is a library service that provides faculty members the opportunity to collect and arrange selected works for their students' use while enrolled in a specific course. Ares promotes open access that is prevalent in academia without infringing on copyright law. 

Fordham Libraries' staff members rely on fair use for all materials posted on electronic reserves. Documents not meeting fair use criteria only can be posted with written permissions granted by the copyright holder and secured by the faculty member. For information regarding how to secure permissions, please see Additional Resources.

Faculty have the option of submitting their course materials via Ares, email, or in person at the Reserves Desk of their campus library. Once course materials are submitted, Reserves staff members  will check for copyright compliance. Course materials are active on the course page in Ares for a defined timeframe, and non-current course pages are archived and available for future use. Once approved, the pages are protected with a unique password allowing only limited access to students enrolled in those specific courses. Course page passwords are created and disseminated by faculty members, and they should be updated regularly.

Less is usually better.  When determining if your use is a fair use, please remember that reproducing a small portion or excerpt of material from a work under copyright is generally better than reproducing a longer portion. The key to determining fair use is the relation of the excerpt to the work as a whole: Even small portions or snippets may weigh against and violate fair use if they are central to--or actually are--the heart of the work. A classic example of this is using the part of Gerald Ford's memoirs in which he discusses pardoning Richard Nixon--that would violate fair use even though it is only a small portion of the original work.

To assist you in making these judgments, please refer to the Fair Use Checklist below.