PWR 312 Technical Writing Class Guide

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:

• eBook Copyright Considerations for Faculty
• Streaming Video Copyright Considerations for Faculty

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 :

• 17 USC for the code itself (copyright law in its entirety)
• § 100 to denote the proper section of the law that has been consulted

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:

1. The purpose of the use, including whether the use is for commercial, nonprofit, or educational purposes.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work—how much of the content is creative work and how much is factual information?
3. The amount of the portion used in relation to the work as a whole.
4. The effect your use will have on the market of the resource.

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:

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: