Copyright refers to the legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator (e.g. the photographer of a photograph or the author of a book) to receive compensation for their intellectual effort.

Visit copyright.gov to access the body of copyright law in the United States.

Here are a few rules of thumb when it comes to copyright and eLearning:

• Determine if the materials you wish to use fall under Fair Use. If they do, use away. If they don’t stay away. When in doubt, consult with your embedded librarian (CAHS | DCG) or with me, as your instructional designer.
• Link to the site of origin rather than providing information from the respective site. Not only is this method more copyright friendly, but it also ensures that you are providing the most up-to-date content version.
• Avoid scanning documents or downloading full-text PDF files (and other materials) and uploading them to your D2L course. If you must have those resources in your course, talk to:
  • your embedded librarian about how to direct your students to use our library databases to find any resources that you need (e.g., newspapers, journals, books, videos, etc.)
  • your embedded instructional designer about selling students a cost-effective, copyright-cleared article and/or book chapter reproduction in the form of a course pack that can be linked to your course.
• Be aware that images found through an online search are not automatically licensed for public use.
  • A good way to search Google Images is to sort by image rights, as shown in Figure 1.
  • A site that contains images that can be reused is Wikimedia Commons.
  • Whenever using images that were not created by you, provide a citation and/or link, just as you would for text material.

Fig. 1: Sorting Google Images by Usage Rights

Here is a copyright decision guide put together by Thomas J. Tobin of Northeastern Illinois University.

Finally, below is a comprehensive copyright resource created by our very own GRU library (use the vertical/horizontal scroll bars as needed).