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This article provides educators with the basics of fair use in relation to the Copyright Act. Copyright infringement is briefly mentioned to explain the four determining factors of copyright use.

The article starts out by asking the question when professors send students papers to a database, are copyrights violated? This article discusses electronic tools being used to determine student plagiarism. Turnitin.com is a common electronic tool that professors and teachers provide for their students to turn in their papers. In the United States, 400 colleges use this website. Lawyers detect that this is an infringement on students copyright. The founder of turnitin.com apologized for violating student's rights and advised professors to advise students that copies of their papers will be checked and kept in the database for plagiarism. Then they discuss success stories of how professors and schools are not concerned with lawsuits.

This article is created by the U.S. Copyright office. It briefly discusses some of the fair use factors in accordance with Secion 107 of the title 17, U.S. code. It explains that the distinction between fair use and copyright infringement may be difficult to define because there is no specification on the amount of text that can be used. But it does use the 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law to state some fair use examples that the court has identified as acceptable.

While this article focuses on how librarians feel about and deal with the complexities of copyright and fair use rules, I find it relevant and valuable for classroom teachers too. Fear of plagiarism and copyright infringement in our classrooms is real, and can restrain us from implementing resources just as much as it can librarians.

This is a short video that discusses the protection of works and how one must obtain permission to use copyrighted material. It also explains the period of protection before copyrighted material become the public domain. Lastly, it focuses on fair use for educational purposes with the use of citations and limitations. The video ends discussing who is affected by copyright infringement.