ERes Copyright Guidelines

It is your responsibility to determine copyright compliance in posting materials on ERes. As a general rule, a one time usage of a portion of a copyrighted work is acceptable but any further usage must adhere to copyright guidelines. To be in compliance you have three choices--

• Use only public domain materials
• Stay within the "fair use" exemption
• Seek permission from copyright holder to use material

Public domain materials
These are older materials that have passed out of copyright protection (generally the life of the author plus 70 years.)

Fair Use
Consider the following four issues in your determination of "fair use." Each is weighed equally.

• Purpose and character of use. Educational use is favored over commercial use.
• Type of work. Factual works are less protected than creative works.
• Percentage of work. Look at the percentage of the whole that you want to post. Two chapters of a 20 chapter book is more acceptable than 10 chapters.
• Market effect. Is anyone profiting from this usage? If the answer is "yes," you must seek permission from the publisher/author. For instance, you would not be within fair use compliance if you uploaded the class text so that your students would not have to buy it.

Getting Permission from Copyright Holder
You may contact the publisher or the Copyright Clearance Center. In many instances the copyright holder will give permission without charging a fee. This does take some time so plan ahead. Occasionally a publisher will charge a high fee which will effectively disallow electronic usage.

Additional Considerations

Passwords
We recommend that you password any coursepage that contains copyrighted materials.

Student Work
If you post student work on your website you must get permission in advance from that student to comply with FERPA (Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act) regulations.

For more information on this subject see: Ferullo, Donna. The Challenge of E-Reserves. Netconnect (supplement to Library Journal). Summer 2002. pp. 33-35. (available in LexisNexis Academic).