Designing Digital Scholarship Projects: Copyright and fair use

Design principles & entry-level tools to begin developing digital scholarship projects

Need Help?

Copyright basics

In the USA, copyright is a federal law that provides content creators the exclusive rights to copy, distribute, and remix the content they create for a limited period of time. Federal copyright law specifically protects works of “intellectual property” or creative expressions of ideas in fixed symbolic form, like books, films, songs, or artworks.

Learn more at UW–Madison Libraries
Understanding the basics about how copyright works and about some of the exceptions to those rights will help you ensure that your creations are used in the way you choose and that you respect others’ rights to control how their creations are used.

Fair use basics

Fair use overview at Stanford Libraries
Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. For example, if you wish to criticize a novelist, you should have the freedom to quote a portion of the novelist’s work without asking permission. Absent this freedom, copyright owners could stifle any negative comments about their work.
Fair use checklist at Columbia University Libraries
The Fair Use Checklist and variations on it have been widely used for many years to help educators, librarians, lawyers, and many other users of copyrighted works determine whether their activities are within the limits of fair use under U.S. copyright law (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act). The four factors form the structure of this checklist. Congress and courts have offered some insight into the specific meaning of the factors, and those interpretations are reflected in the details of this form.

Attribution and citation

Attribution ascribes a work to the author or artist who is responsible for it.
A citation gives credit to the source where you found the work and helps the reader locate the source.
You want to tell your audience who is responsible for any work you are using, and the source where you found the work to help them locate the source for themselves.

Learn more at UW–Madison Libraries
What information do I need?
1. Creator’s name or screen name
2. Object title or name
3. Source (if object came from another work) - include author, title & date
4. Format (video, frame, etc.)
5. URL for a web site and the date you accessed the object
6. URL for the CC license if using Creative Commons (CC) object