Copyright, Fair Use, and the Public Domain

Copyright protects the intellectual ownership of creative works, and governs the rights of individuals to share or reproduce substantial parts of those works. Copyright of individual works will govern the ways that you can use these works in your own projects.

Policies of ‘Fair Use’ allow individuals to use copyrighted material in certain contexts (such as nonprofit educational ones), which means that you can use other people’s work for unpublished student projects. The guidelines for the use of material depends on the individual licensing of the source, however, which means that crediting the material that you use (such as photos from a website) is not always enough. It’s important to check the usage rights on any photos or video clips and footage that you use in your project.

• If creative material is labeled ‘All Rights Reserved,’ this means you cannot use it because the image is copyrighted. Most content is copyrighted like this by default.

• If creative material is licensed by Creative Commons or Wikimedia, then this material is available for you to use within certain guidelines. Both Creative Commons and Wikimedia are non-profit organizations that work to provide educational access to creative works; material in these organizations are available for use. It is important that you follow the rules for use as laid out by the usage rights -- usually this includes crediting the author of the materials and linking to the appropriate license. Suggestions for finding material (such as images and film footage) on these websites can be found below. Here is a description of the types of licenses within Creative Commons- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

• If creative material is available within the public domain, that means this material is available for you to use because such material is not protected by intellectual property laws. Suggestions about how to find and access non-copyrighted material (such as images and film footage) can be found in the following pages.

For more info, see this article- “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video” published in 2008 by the Center for Media & Social Impact https://cmsimpact.org/code/code-best-practices-fair-use-online-video/