Fair Use and Digital Materials

Guidelines

These guidelines are based upon the 1998 Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) report to congress and have their roots in the original Kastenmeier Guidelines from 1976. The AD Hoc committee that composed those guidelines clearly indicated that the guidelines were meant to be a minimum that constituted educational fair use. The guidelines have not been passed into law and represent the suggested conditions under which educators can use copyright protected materials without getting consent of the author or creator of the work. They are presented here to assist you in making decisions about whether or not your intended use of certain materials is fair or what is an infringement. Remember these are guidelines and not hard and fast rules. Use them to guide you in your selection of educational materials.


Recent innovations in computer and information technologies such as high quality graphic scanners, CD-ROMs, high speed modems, Internet, etc. have made access to, and retrieval of, all types of media very easy. However, just because these media are easily accessible and stored in digital format does not mean that they are not copyright protected! While there is still much debate on how existing copyright laws apply to these types of media, they should be treated the same as traditional media with regard to copyright and fair use.


Thanks to Austin Community College for permission to use the information from their copyright pages.


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This page last updated on 6/11/2007.
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