Copyright Guide for Teaching

Copyright is a type of intellectual property. It allows the copyright owner to protect against others copying or reproducing their work. Copyright arises automatically when a work that qualifies for protection is created. The work must be original, meaning it needs to originate with the author, who will have used some judgement or skill in its creation.

The main works currently protected by copyright in the UK include:

• Original literary works (such as novels, poems, tables, lists, and computer programmes)
• Original dramatic works
• Original musical works (i.e. the musical notes themselves)
• Original artistic works
• Sound recordings
• Films
• Broadcasts
• Typographical arrangements (i.e. the layout or actual appearance) of published editions

Copyright protects the rights of the creators of intellectual property but also recognising the legitimate need for others to use this material. The main legislation dealing with copyright in the United Kingdom is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 (CPDA 1988) under which copying is prohibited even for teaching purposes unless:

• It is carried out under licence, or
• It is carried out under the fair dealing provisions (exceptions) of the Act, or
• Permission is obtained from the copyright owner.

A number of significant changes to the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act came into force in June and October 2014. Of particular interest to teaching staff are the changes that affect copying for illustration for instruction.  This allows teachers or students to use copyright work in teaching or study where the use fall within 'Fair dealing 'usage. It allows the inclusion of text, images, music or video in teaching slides and lecture recordings and adding content to examination papers.

A list of the all copyright exceptions can be found at Gov.UK

'Fair dealing’ is a concept allowable in UK Copyright Law . Many of the education exceptions rely on this concept of fair dealing and are often referred to as the 'fair dealing exceptions'.  Unlike The CLA ( Copyright Licensing Agency) Higher Education Licence, the amounts that can be copied are not defined. Because  there are no are no defined limits of what is fair, each individual must make a judgment and decide whether their copying is fair if they are relying on 'fair dealing' as their defence. Questions that might help you decide whether the use is fair are:

•  Is the amount copied reasonable and appropriate to the context?
•  Have I copied no more than I need to?
•  Does the copying negatively affect sales of the work?
•  Have I acknowledged the work appropriately?

Unless there is a specific reason why you cannot acknowledge the sources, there must always be sufficient acknowledgment of the copyright owner and source of the material if the use is to be considered fair.

Fair dealing is a UK legal term and allows copying of copyright works without permissions. Fair use is the US legal term that allows copying under certain conditions under US Law. Fair dealing will always involve a degree of risk assessment on the part of the person using copyright material.

The CLA ( Copyright Licencing Agency) has a mandate from publishers, authors and visual artists to offer collective licences on their behalf. The Higher education (HE) CLA licence provides annual blanket permissions to copy and reuse content from print and digital publications covered by its licence . It covers:

• Sharing copies with students and staff;
• Storing copies on your intranet;
• Copying up to one article, chapter or 10% of the total, whichever is greater;
• Copying  publications from the UK plus 38 international territories.

Not all published works are covered by the CLA Higher Education Licence. The following categories of works are excluded:

• Printed music (including the words);
• Maps and charts;
• Newspapers;
• Any work on which the copyright owner has expressly and prominently stipulated that it may not be copied under a CLA licence: workbooks, workcards or assignment sheets.

In addition to these excluded categories there are lists of excluded works and specific US titles that are not covered by the CLA licence. The CLA have a developed a useful Check Permissions Tool which can be used to check whether a specific book is covered by the licence.

The licence allows the library to offer a Scanning service whereby PDFs of book chapters and journal articles can be added to the Leganto reading lists in the MLS. There are limits to the amount  of copyright material that can be scanned  and these are listed below.  Library staff carry out all the licensing checks. Our CLA HE licence does not allow teaching staff to scan book chapters or journal articles and add these to Leganto or My Learning Space. 

Limits for scanning under CLA HE licence: 

• One chapter from a book. 
• One article from 1 issue of a journal.
• One whole report of a single case from a volume of judicial proceedings. 
• One short story, poem or play (not exceeding 10 pages in length) from an anthology.
• One whole scene from a play.
• One whole paper from a set of conference proceedings.
• Or, 10% of any of the above whichever is the greater.

In addition the scanned copy must be made from:

• The original book or journal and a copy of this must be held by the University.
• Material which was originally published in the UK or US with the exception of publishers who have not signed up to the licence. 
• Materials supplied from the British Library using their copyright fee paid materials. 

Material that is already available electronically in the Library will not normally be scanned under our CLA licence as you should be able to add a link to the material on your Leganto reading list.

Yes. The CLA HE licence allows Library staff to offer a scanning/digitisation service whereby PDFs of book chapters and articles can be made available to students  on a particular module via the Leganto reading lists in the MLS.

There are limits to the amount that can be scanned under the licence and these are listed below. When scanned extracts are made available via Leganto, library staff carry out all the licensing checks and ensure that all the CLA HE License requirements are met. Scanned copies must be made from the original book or journal and a copy of this must be held by the University or supplied by the British Library as a copyright fee paid copy.

Our CLA HE licence does not allow teaching staff to scan book chapters or journal articles and add these to Leganto or My Learning Space. 

Limits for scanning under CLA HE licence: 

• One chapter from a book. 
• One article from 1 issue of a journal.
• One whole report of a single case from a volume of judicial proceedings. 
• One short story, poem or play (not exceeding 10 pages in length) from an anthology.
• One whole scene from a play.
• One whole paper from a set of conference proceedings.
• Or, 10% of any of the above whichever is the greater.

Scans of book chapters or a journal articles that the university does not hold electronically can be requested by teaching staff using the online request form or by simply emailing the details of the scan (e.g., module name and code, book title, extract title, year of publication and page range) to your academic librarian. 

Online request form. If you are a new user, click on 'New User' and complete the registration. (You only need to register the first time you use the service). Use your Abertay email address as your username (e.g., a.512345@uad.ac.uk). Guidance on registering and completing the online form can be found Guide to Using the Online Form . Staff are encouraged to use the online request form when possible.

No. Our CLA licence stipulates that the preparation and distribution of digital copies can only be carried out by designated staff. Lecturers are not authorised to scan copyright materials themselves and upload the scanned material to Leganto as the licence does not allow this.

To request a book chapter or journal article to be scanned for adding to your reading list or MyLearningSpace you should use the online request form.

When choosing material to digitise for particular modules the scanned material should be provided to enrich the students’ learning experience. It should not be used to create a collection that would cover substantially the same material as a standard textbook and it should not be created to provide students with an alternative to buying a textbook for their course.

If you do this then this would be considered as text book substitution and would not comply with the use of our CLA HE Licence.The CLA Good Practice Guide provides useful advice on how to use the library scanning service to enhance your teaching and avoid textbook substitution.

Library staff will  process your request as quickly as possible but at busy times of the year you should allow up to 5 working days for your requests to be processed.  However, as canning is outsourced to the British Library, turnaround also depends on how quickly the British Library are able to produce the scan. We have no control over this part of the process.

Yes you can but you must email library@abertay.ac.uk to let library staff know that you want to use the scan in an additional module.

Each reading list will require a different link to the scanned material. Library staff can easily create a new link to the scanned chapter and add this to the new reading list.

There are many sources of information including videos and images on the internet which are created under licences such Creative Commons Licenses that allow the content to be re- used and in some cases adapted for re-use. Most of the most commonly used search engines have in-built tools which allow you to filter your search results to include only free-to-use images and some have been developed specifically to facilitate access to material that can be re-used  with limited or no restrictions.  You can use  Wikimedia Commons or the Creative Commons Search to search for free content in the public domain and/or under Creative Commons licenses. Information and guidance on finding images is available on the library's Newspapers and multimedia guide.

The CLA licence also permits 'disembedded' images to be copied from licensed works and used for instructive purposes within a lecture including when the lecture slides are uploaded to My Learning Space. Any surrounding text other than the descriptive caption should be cropped out, otherwise you will need to request a CLA compliant scan using the online request form.

You can also use copyright images for teaching under one of the Fair dealing exceptions , e.g., s32  Illustration for instruction or s.30 Quotation. To be fair, use only what you need and acknowledge the copyright owner and source of the published material. If using whole images  use a lower resolution of the image than in the published image if at all possible.

Citing the images you use is important. Information on best practices for crediting images is available from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution. 

For further information, email library@abertay.ac.uk 

If the 3rd party copyright material is not covered by a licence and you do not have permission from the copyright holder then one of the copyright exceptions such as  s.32 Illustration for instruction or s.30 Criticism, review, quotation and news reporting would most likely cover the use of this material in your recorded lecture, just as it would do in an in-person lecture in a lecture room. 

With either of these exceptions, the work must be sufficiently acknowledged, and the copying must fall within the usage of 'fair dealing'. There are actions that you can take to minimise the risk of copyright infringement with online teaching and these are listed below.

• Good practice is only to have the material available to students on a particular module. At Abertay, the use of My Learning Space (MLS) is ideal as only students on the module can access the module content.
• Including a standard statement /notification on the title or first slide of recorded lectures that states any 3^rd party material is included under licence or by a copyright exception (there is no need to specify which exception) and that the recordings are provided for students on a particular module, and that no further copying or posting/sharing etc is allowed. If technical measures are possible to prevent recorded lectures being downloaded this would be a useful option to have if needed.
• Recorded slides must (a) provide an acknowledgement for all the 3^rd party content e.g., images, video or film clips, quotations (unless there is a very good reason why doing this is not possible), and (b) the material used must be for a specific educational benefit and no more than is necessary should be used.
• When using images, often the whole image will be used. To make the use more ‘fair’, good practice would be to use a lower image resolution for the image.
• If staff are particularly concerned about including specific material in the recording, they could edit that content out of the recording and indicate that the material has been removed or provide a link to it if it is available online.

If you have particular concerns about including 3rd party copyright material in your recorded lectures or any other teaching material, please email library@abertay.ac.uk or contact one of the librarians.

Showing a film to a class

There is a specific copyright exception s.34 - Performing, playing or showing work in course of activities of educational establishment that allows a teacher to play or show films, sound recordings or broadcasts to staff and students on campus for the purposes of instruction. This would cover  showing the film to students in a lecture or seminar i.e., face-to-face teaching.

This exception would not cover showing a film online but this use could be covered by S.32 Illustration for instruction  provided that the dealing is:

• for a non-commercial purpose,
• by a person giving or receiving instruction (or preparing for giving or receiving instruction), and
• accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement (unless this would be impossible for reasons of practicality or otherwise).
• the use meets the criteria for 'fair dealing'.

Giving or receiving instruction” includes setting examination questions, communicating the questions to pupils and answering the questions.

If you want to show a film or play music at a student society event, open lecture or other extra-curricular activity, you will need to apply for a licence from the appropriate agency. 

There may be situations where the film which the lecturer wants to show to the class is not available in a format that the University can purchase a licence or the actual film.  For example, some films are only available form Streaming services which do not offer an institutional account or licensing option

A Code of Fair Practice for the Use of Audiovisual Works in Film Education has been created to help UK educators make informed decisions abut the lawful use of copyright protected films and audio visual materials for teaching. This guide does not constitute legal advice but describes common educational uses of copyright film and audiovisual content for teaching. However,  it is important to bear in mind that use of a Copyright exception will always come down to a risk assessment. This will involve considering the risks, including the commercial value of the work, whether the potential use would affect the commercial exploitation of the work and, the litigiousness of the copyright owner. if you are considering using this guidance, it would be advisable to seek advice from the Library. Email library@abertay.ac.uk.

Abertay holds an ERA (Educational Recording Licence).  This licence enables educational establishments to legally make recordings or copies of TV and radio programmes for educational use. Film, programmes, etc., covered by the ERA licence can be recorded and shown via the MLS. However, there is one important restriction to the ERA licence. You are not allowed to access ERA copies outside of the UK or make those copies available outside the UK. If you require further information, please email library@abertay.ac.uk.

For teaching the most useful fair dealing exception is S.32. This allows all types of copyright works to be copied for the sole purpose of illustration for instruction. So lecturers can use extracts from films, sound recordings, text, and other artistic works to illustrate a teaching point but the use must be fair - i.e  they must use only what is necessary and the source should be acknowledged unless there is a very good reason why  acknowledgment cannot be given.

Yes - you can copy copyright works for setting an examination question. Copying material for setting an examination is covered by s.32 the illustration for instruction exception. The amount copied must be fair and usually must include sufficient acknowledgment unless there is a very good reason why you cannot acknowledge the source.

When reusing 3^rd party copyright material you should check if there is a re-use licence associated with the material. If there is then this makes things a lot easier as the licence will clearly state how you can use the content without having to contact the copyright owner for permission.

Many sites containing images, audio, videos, etc., will let you search for material that allows re-use. For example, Creative Commons (CC) licences are a common filter on many sites. For images there are reverse image search engines such as Tin Eye and Google images  also includes this functionality. If you have found an image on a site, labelled CC BY but you want to double check the source you can use these search engines to check the  source of the image.

If it is clear the the material has not been made available by the copyright owner or there is some doubt over who posted it then you should not use it. Linking to content that you suspect is posted illegally does risk infringing copyright. Try and find an alternative source for the material.  If there is no other source and there is no alternative material, email Library@abertay.ac.uk. 

• A good credit would allow the person reading it to know the source of the material.
• For print materials, these would be similar to the information for referencing. For online materials it would be author, title, URL and licence if known. 
• If using CC0 material a credit is not required but it is always thought best practice to include one.
• Guidance on crediting 3rd party images is available from https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution For lecture slides, the credit could be underneath each image or, if this was not suitable, the images could be numbered and picture credits given at the end on the last slide.  

Staff are reminded that they are responsible for ensuring their actions are compliant with UK copyright law and the copyright licences held by the University. Although the University has a responsibility to ensure that staff (and students) are aware of copyright and comply with the law, it remains the responsibility of the person making copies or adding content to their reading list or modules to ensure they do not infringe copyright. Any materials or activities that do not comply with copyright law or the terms of the University's copyright licences will be removed.

If you need further information, please email library@abertay.ac.uk .