540-828-5642 research@bridgewater.edu 540-318-1962
Special Collections For assistance with primary sources related to:
540-828-8018 Stephanie Gardner
Copyright law is an important, nuanced part of the law, and it exists to protect the intellectual property of creators. That being said, in many cases, copyright is seen to be shrouded in grey areas and interpretations vary greatly across different contexts.
I am not a lawyer, and any copyright considerations should ultimately be taken to a lawyer.
That being said, I often consult with faculty about the use of resources in the classes. For example, see:
The entirety of the official Copyright Law of the United States is available through the copyright.gov:
As you are doing this research, you will want to keep track of what sections of the law pertain to your topics, and you will need to make sure that you cite the law.
Copyright law is under US Code 17 and is broken up into sections. To denote this, we use :
What we are ultimately trying to determine is whether the digitization of these resources falls under fair use, because we know that this is copyrighted work that we are viewing.
To determine whether a title falls into fair use, libraries conduct fair uses analyses, which includes four factors:
Librarians will often use the Fair Use Checklist to determine whether or not a resource falls under fair use:
Even with the Fair Use Checklist, it can be difficult to determine the copyright and whether fair use applies. See, for example, this discussion with the New York Public Library:
Please ensure that you are doing your due diligence and attempted to perform lateral reading.
Lateral reading is a strategy intended to look at multiple sides of the same conversation. It is often used by professional fact-checkers to determine the validity of a claim, but it is especially useful here because we are going to need to distill information from a number of sources.
Any time that I am trying to make a determination about copyright in consultation with faculty, I consult many sources before sending a response. Here are some suggested resources:
For this research, I recommend searching .edu websites and .gov using the site: function in Google. Example searches include:
When you do this, you will find information only from colleges and the copyright office so that you are cutting out content that might have an agenda attached.
If you're looking for more resources, specifically academic resources, I recommend these two databases, which have a host of information about digitization of materials: