This guidance is designed to help academic staff understand the copyright issues related to teaching. Ownership of copyright in materials created by individual members of staff is covered by the Intellectual Property Policy.
Copyright is a legal right that protects the copyright owner and offers protection against others copying or reproducing their work. The CPDA 1988 covers books, novels, technical reports, manuals, paintings, sculptures, photographs, music, songs, dramatic works, films, television, and radio broadcasts, engineering, technical plans, promotional literature, advertising, computer software and databases.
Copyright law aims to strike a balance between the rights of the copyright owner to control how their work is used and the rights of re-use subject to certain limits and conditions. This guidance aims to help teaching staff understand how they can use copyright material legally in their teaching.
Copyright material is usually used for teaching in one of the following ways.
- Use licenced material that permits you to use the work for teaching.
- Use one of the permitted acts ‘exceptions’ allowed by CPDA 1988.
Licences are a good way to use copyright material for teaching and when an appropriate licence exists it should be used to provide access to the material. Licences specify exactly how the material can be used, who can use it and any associated limitations or restrictions. Abertay holds a number of collective (blanket) licences such as the Copyright Licensing Agency Higher Education Licence - CLA He licence, the Educational Recording Agency Licence - ERA licence and the NLA Education Establishment Licence licence. These licences allow copyright material to be used for teaching within specific limits and restrictions.
The CLA HE licence is a really useful licence for the provision of teaching materials. It allows library staff to offer a CLA scanning service, which provides digital copies (PDFs of book chapters and journal articles) for students via the module reading lists in the MLS. The licence, underpinned by UK Copyright law, has restrictions on the content that can be scanned and the amounts that can be scanned. Library staff carry out all the copyright checks required.
The library also pays for electronic resources which also allow material to be used for teaching. Each licence is different and best practice is to share the link to an article from one of the library's licenced database.
There is also now a lot of open access/freely available content that is licenced with an open licence such as the Creative Commons Licences and Open Government Licence (OGL) which allow the material to be re-used within the terms specified by the licence.
Copyright exceptions are a good way to provide material for teaching when it is not possible to find material covered by a licence. The two most useful UK copyright exceptions for teaching are S.32 Illustration for instruction and S.30 Criticism, review, quotation . Both these exceptions rely on the concept of ‘fair dealing’. Unfortunately, fair dealing is not defined in UK law and, therefore, deciding whether the use is ‘fair’ and covered by one of the exceptions will often involve a degree of uncertainty. To help you decide whether the use is fair, you should consider the following questions.
- 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.
If the material cannot be copied using a licence or by one of the Copyright exceptions then permission from the copyright holder would be required.