You might assume instructors are allowed to use copyrighted works for "educational use."
Educational purpose is a dimension of fair use, but there's no one right answer as to what constitutes a "fair use" of a particular copyrighted work. The answer varies from situation to situation.
Please use these examples as a suggested starting point and be sure to use the Fair Use Evaluator, if you deem it appropriate to do so.
Also, please be advised that courts are not bound by established standards or guidelines and the Copyright Act contains no such standards. Therefore, we advise that you always conduct your own fair use evaluation.
Multimedia works are created by combining copyrighted elements such as movies, music, sounds, graphics, and text. It is recommended that you use only small portions of other people's works.
CONFU recommendations allow you to use small portions of multimedia works without obtaining copyright permissions. Following CONFU guidelines you may:
Open Access publishing provides scholarly research literature freely online. This is one of the ways educational institutions, especially state-funded educational institutions, give back to the communities that support them. This scholarly literature often has less restrictive copyright protections for authors and barriers for users.
A good example of how helpful this can be is available in the PubMed database--the National Institutes of Health medical database, and one of the first places NWACC faculty and students may encounter open access research. In short, if research is funded by taxpayer dollars via government agency grants--such as the NIH or NSF--these agencies also require that said publications be available for free, as well is in proprietary journals.
Find more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. Some results will be paywalled - contact the library about interlibrary loan.
One way to avoid copyright confusion and pitfalls is to use content with an open license. Open Educational Resources often carry Creative Commons or other type of open license. They can be freely used as long as you follow the license conditions.