Sometimes questions of academic integrity (such as avoiding plagiarism) can be confused with legal questions of copyright and intellectual property.

While academic integrity is a matter of ethics, copyright is the law. Although digital technology has made some aspects of copyright more complex, knowing the basics can help you to use material legally and to protect your own creative works.

Every day you work with copyrighted materials created by other people. Whenever you read a book, download a song, stream a video or play a video game, you are probably dealing with copyrighted materials. You also create copyrighted works regularly. When you write an original email or paper, record a song or video, or take a photograph you have created a work that is protected by copyright.

The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation and sharing of creative works. Copyright gives creators an incentive to produce and share new works by granting them exclusive rights to their work for a limited time. This provides an opportunity for a creator to benefit from his or her work.

What Copyright Covers

There are several types of works that can be protected, including:

• Literary works
• Musical works, including any accompanying words
• Dramatic works, including any accompanying music
• Pantomimes and choreography
• Pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works
• Motion pictures and other audiovisual works
• Sound recordings
• Architectural works

In addition to these, new formats such as email, software, video games, and digital works including web pages and online images have all been determined to have copyright protection.

What ISN’T Covered by Copyright?

Not all works are covered by copyright. Those not covered include:

• Works not fixed in a tangible medium
  • A song in your head, but not recorded or written down
• Ideas
  • Boy meets girl, they fall in love and live happily ever after
  • Hero protagonist saves the world with the help of wacky sidekick
• Facts
  • 1+1=2
  • George IV died in 1830
  • Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark
• Works of the U.S. government produced by government employees
  • Federal government reports
  • Acts/Bills of Congress
  • www.whitehouse.gov
• Works already in the public domain (see below)
  • Moby Dick
  • Shakespeare’s plays
  • Beethoven’s works

Public Domain

Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura, 1830-32) is in the Public Domain.

Copyright protection of a work doesn’t last forever. Once the copyright term ends for a work, it enters the public domain. This means that no one owns the rights to the work anymore, so the work may be used by anyone, for any purpose, without permission. The public domain includes works where copyright has expired and works that were never protected by copyright in the first place (such as works of the U.S. federal government created by federal employees).

Due to U.S. participation in international treaties and changes to U.S. copyright law, Congress has placed a limitation on the length of copyright so that works can eventually become part of the public domain and be re-used and built upon by others. Over the years the term of copyright has changed significantly.

The current term is:

• 70 years after death of author. If there are multiple authors, then it is 70 years after the death of the last author.
• If corporate, or anonymous, authorship the term is either 95 years from date of first publication, or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever comes first.

Respecting Copyright

While working with other people’s copyrighted works, remember that their works are under copyright protection from the moment of creation.

Additionally, U.S. Copyright Law applies to works found on the Internet. Many of the works you find online are protected by copyright, even if there is no copyright notice. Your ability to access copyrighted materials on the Internet does not necessarily mean that you have the right to use, reuse and distribute the works in any manner you wish. It is important to respect copyright, whether the works are in a physical or digital format.

Fair Use

Are you incorporating any materials in your research final product that were created by someone else, such as images or text from other works? These materials could be protected by copyright. For example, content you find online, text, books, movies, songs, email, images, and videos are most likely copyrighted. Fortunately, U.S. copyright law includes an exception, called fair use, that allows you to use copyrighted work in your assignments for class.

However, if you would like to share your research product outside of the classroom (such as on a webpage or blog or in your portfolio), you will need permission from the copyright owner(s) unless your use is covered under another statutory exception. Fair use is one such exception, and it can apply to a wide variety of uses.

Instead of specifying an exact type of user, type of material or amount that qualifies for this exception, the fair use statute provides a framework for the analysis and application of four factors that determine whether or not a particular use may qualify as fair use.

The four factors of fair use are:

• Purpose & character of use, including whether commercial (i.e. publishing a book) or non-commercial (i.e. using in a classroom assignment)
• Nature of the original material (i.e., is the work published or unpublished? Fact or fiction? Highly creative?)
• Amount and substantiality of the original work (are you using the entire work or just a portion?)
• Effect on the marketplace or on the work’s value (will your use have a financial impact on the creator?)

When considering whether a proposed use of a copyrighted work may qualify as fair use, you must weigh all four factors together. Each factor is equally important.

Creative Commons

The internet has made the creation and sharing of creative works much easier than it has ever been. Most of these new works are protected by copyright as soon as they are created. But not everyone wants to lock up their creativity behind the protection of copyright. Many people want their work to be freely shared and even built upon.

Creative Commons (CC) was developed out of the desire to make it easier to share and use copyrighted works. Creative Commons allows a creator to grant licenses to their work that could include the ability to share, adapt and/or use material for commercial purposes without having to ask for permission. The creators still own the copyright, but they proactively decide to let others use their works under certain conditions.