The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in the Visual Arts (2015) created by the College Art Association offers excellent guidance on a range of situations and scenarios. In the section on "Teaching about Art" it lays out the following principle and its limitations:
PRINCIPLE: Teachers in the visual arts may invoke fair use in using copyrighted works of various kinds to support formal instruction in a range of settings, as well as for uses that extend such teaching and for reference collections that support it, subject to certain limitations:
LIMITATIONS:
- The works selected should further the teacher’s substantive pedagogical objectives.
- The teacher’s pedagogical objective should predominate over that of merely representing the work or works used.
- Student access to course management sites where such works are made available should be restricted to those enrolled in the course or otherwise designated by the teacher.
- Images made available to students should, to the extent possible, accurately represent the works they depict.
- If providing downloadable images online is justified by the teacher’s objectives, those images should be suitable in size for satisfactory full-screen projection or display on a personal computer or mobile device, but generally not larger.
- When displayed, images should be accompanied by attribution of the original work as is customary in the field, to the extent possible.
- Images and other items in a reference collection should be augmented with appropriate and reasonably available metadata.
- Access to an institutional reference collection should be limited to persons affiliated with the institution and its partner institutions, such as students, faculty, and authorized researchers, subject to a requirement that items in the collection should be used only for legitimate purposes.
Fair use generally covers copying of images for teaching in a nonprofit educational institution. The Visual Rights Association maintains a webpage with Resources Providing Guidance on Academic Use of Images. It includes the VRA's "Statement on Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study." This statement describes six uses of copyrighted images that are considered to fall within the parameters of fair use, including "Use of Images for Teaching Purposes." That section offers the following guidance for those educators making fair use of copyrighted images in their teaching:
- Notify students the works are under copyright and being shared for educational purposes only.
- Employ access restrictions which will ensure the images are only accessible by students registered in the course.
- Provide attributions to copyright owners when possible.
- Avoid using third-party products or software to share the images which are not nonprofit or strictly educational.
Image Resources
The Adelphi Libraries subscribe to ARTSTOR, which has images that can be used with in the classroom; these can be linked to from Moodle.
Images from these internet resources can also be used for both face-to-face teaching and distance education settings.
According to Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) guidelines up to 10%, but no more than 30 seconds, of the music and lyrics from an individual musical work (or in the aggregate of extracts from an individual work), whether the musical work is embodied in copies, or audio or audiovisual works, may be reproduced or otherwise incorporated as a part of a multimedia project, and any alterations to a musical work shall not change the basic melody or the fundamental character of the work.
Fair Use allows the full length of a movie to be shown during regular class time where only enrolled students and the instructor are present and in situations when viewing the movie in its entirety is required for the course. In an online only class, a professor cannot convert the full length of a movie to a streaming format without obtaining the permission of the copyright holder because according to copyright law the right to reproduce a copyrighted work in copies is the exclusive right of the copyright holder.
The TEACH Act [Section 110(2) of the US Copyright Act] does provide for the digital transmission of films for the purpose of distance education in limited circumstances. However, this act does not apply when a film's distributor limits use with their license, which always overrides any provisions of the TEACH Act. Streaming entire commercial, general release movies through classroom management systems such as Moodle is also questionable under Fair Use, and it is usually not possible to get streaming rights to commercial movies. Educational videos usually come at a cost that allow streaming rights.Thus, streaming of commercial films and educational films is on a case by case basis depending on whether a film is still in copyright or if it is from a vendor that requires a license to be signed for streaming rights.
Consult with your library liaison who can follow up for you as to the options for streaming a particular video and the availability of substitute copyright free videos that are available in library databases. The University Libraries provide copyright free access to the interdisciplinary streaming video database, Academic Video Online, which can be accessed directly through the Library website. There is also copyright free access, for a license fee, to Kanopy, an academic video streaming database with over 26,000 educational documentaries and feature films, including portions of The Criterion Collection. Commercial films can sometimes be accessed through the Library's relationship with SWANK, but as this is not a very cost effective option an alternate can be to ask your students to view a film via Netflix, Amazon, or iTunes as part of their required resources for a class.