Fair Use Guidelines
Links to Fair Use Guidelines for educators
Contents [click on the topics to scroll to the text]
U.S. Government Copyright Office
Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
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Fair Use Guidelines
We educators have grown accustomed to using our culture's resources at will to bring the world to our students. The Fair Use Guidelines have historically granted us wide latitude in the classroom to use print, audio and video media in instructional settings. However, digital technology and the ease of reproduction of all media often puts us in conflict with those guidelines in our wider roles as educators, but that same technology offers the tools to keep us on the right side of the law.
The text form of these guidelines can be found here:
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Copyright Renewal Database
Copyright law applied to print media offers special challenges as we seek to determine its copyright status. The above website provides the details as to copyright time limits. The challenge we face is to determine the actual copyright registry status before we can assume any termination of copyright. Stanford University maintains an extensive database that provides that precise information. Go to:
Click on either Simple Search or Advanced Search
to gather information on the media you seek to use or reproduce.
Public Domain Literature
The following links will take you to lists of literature already in the public domain:
U.S. Government Copyright Office
Finally, the U.S. Government has a good deal to say on the topic, beginning with their basic Copyright website, for your reference:
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Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
Fair use doctrine regarding electronic multimedia in education, guidelines published November, 2008.
The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
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