Copyright is a vital consideration in regards to sharing and recognizing created material. The Library supports the Copyright Policy of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a guide for faculty, students, and staff in their pursuit of scholarly work. For questions about copyright, feel free to request a consultation with the Scholarly Communications Office. Below is an overview of copyright to get you started.
How to Use Others’ Content in your Research
When deciding to use content in your scholarly research work, there are many aspects of copyright (a.k.a. rules before copying into your new work) that are worth understanding. Since you don’t own others’ content (and you may not even own your own previously published work!), you often must ask for permission to use it in your work.
These brief guides will aim to explain when and how to ask for permission to use content; when permission isn’t necessary to be cleared; and how to reference the content you’ve used.
- Fair Use Guide– Fair use is a provision in copyright law that permits limited use of copyrighted materials without seeking permission. Our guide helps you navigate copyright laws responsibly, ensuring ethical use of copyrighted works for students, educators, and content creators while respecting the rights of the creators.
Fair Use: The Basics
Another legal way, besides requesting permission, to reuse another’s copyrighted work is through the use of copyright exceptions. These exceptions are built into U.S. copyright law to provide for reuses that are deemed beneficial for society, such as for education or research, to protect certain types of users of copyrighted content, or to fulfill Constitutional requirements such as free speech.
Fair Use is a Type of Copyright Exception
Many copyright exceptions are limited and detailed in their scope. In contrast, fair use is a part of the copyright statute (17 USC 107) that provides a flexible approach to copyright exceptions for a wide variety of useful societal purposes. Such purposes for using fair use include (but are not limited to): criticism, comments, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Four factors are used to analyze whether a use is fair use:
- The purpose and character of use, including whether the use is for commercial or noncommercial purposes;
- The nature of the copyrighted work;
- The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
- The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
In recent years a determination of whether a use is transformative has become an important part of many fair use analyses. A transformative use occurs when the work is used for a “broadly beneficial purpose different from that of the original.”
See the ARL Code of Best Practices for examples of fair use in higher education.
Fair Use Analysis Help
When a fair use analysis is needed, there are a variety of tools that can help:
How to Seek Copyright Permission
- The first step in seeking permission to use copyrighted work is to determine, to the extent possible, whether it is still in copyright. (See information on public domain, formalities, and copyright terms.) The second step is to determine the rights holder. Many publishers have information on their web sites explaining how to seek permission. In addition, consider whether fair use, or another copyright exception, applies for your situation.
- Seeking permission can be a time-consuming process, and it is best to start well ahead of when the license is needed. Many rights holders will want as much information as possible about the intended use. Remember that a lack of response from the rights holder does not equal consent. Optimally, permission should be obtained in writing.
- The Scholarly Communications Office staff can advise you on seeking copyright permission.
- Useful links on seeking permission
- WATCH File: Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders
- Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office. Asking for Permission
- UNC release form for using student work
- Copyright Clearance Center
Author’s Rights
As an author, it is important to know that there may be limitations on what you can physically do with scholarly work you created once it is published.
In efforts to protect UNC faculty’s rights and to promote the scholarship conducted at UNC, the university created preventative measures removing its employer copyright ownership for its staff:
- UNC’s Faculty Council passed a resolution in 2005 stating, “Be it resolved that UNC-Chapel Hill faculty are the owners of their research and should retain ownership and use open access publication venues whenever possible.”
- The Copyright Policy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 2009 aims to balance the needs of the University to use employee work to fulfill its core mission with faculty expectations that they be compensated when their works are commercialized.
Because the idea of “I wrote it, I can do what I want with it” often is not automatic, below we aim to elucidate how to check your current publications, and suggest tips to gain these rights in your future publications. With further questions, please contact Anne Gilliland, Scholarly Communications Officer at Davis Library (Anne_Gilliland@unc.edu).
Know Your Rights, Get Your Rights!
Customarily, academic authors have often assigned their copyright to publishers. Recently, however, many authors have sought more long-term control over the copyright in the works they have created. They may want the flexibility to make their work openly available, either for educational purposes or for general readership. They may want to allow others to reuse their work in certain situations. The best way to keep that control and flexibility is by reading, understanding, and saving a copy of the publishing contract.
Resources
- Author’s Rights and Publishing Contracts guide
This library guide explains author rights in publishing agreements, why authors may not own their work, and offers guidance on finding and negotiating these rights in contracts. It also provides additional resources for recognizing and regaining author rights, with the Scholarly Communications office available for consultations.
Scholarly Communications & Copyright Groups
- University Committee on Copyright
- UNC Center for Media Law and Policy
- UNC School of Law Intellectual Property Initiative
For librarians, please feel free to refer to the following source to learn more about scholarly communications in order to better support your patrons.
- ALA’s Copyright Advisory Network–a forum for librarians to ask copyright questions to scholarly communications librarians