Fair Use and Copyright: Fair Use & COVID-19

While the physical libraries are closed, many resources are still available through CUNY Libraries, whether licensed or openly available. These include library-licensed ebooks, open educational resources, limited reserves, interlibrary loan (ILL), and scanning appropriate amounts under fair use to deliver through your LMS or DropBox account.

In general, ILL is for “personal use” and not to be used to acquire items to be placed on reserve; such items should be purchased. This remains the case even if a library has a print copy but cannot access it to scan it. There is an exception with respect to obtaining accessible materials. Pursuant to the Chaffee Amendment to the Copyright Law, if the library owns a copy but it is not in a format accessible to students with disabilities, the library may use ILL to obtain an accessible (including OCR) version for those students.

Consider the amount that is necessary for scanning. As always, the best practice is to link to public domain, library-licensed, or open-access content that is available online rather than uploading copyrighted materials to your course site.

Scanner apps can combine documents in a multi-page pdf, which may be more usable than the single images that cameras produce. CUNY provides free Dropbox accounts to CUNY students, faculty, and administrative staff, and the Dropbox phone app contains a scanner.
Use a scanner app to:

• Create multi-page documents
• Cloud sync to a storage service (password protected accounts)
• Crop content
• Fast optimization or option to delay
• Generate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for best accessibility 

Some CUNY campuses provide ereserves services; consult librarians at your campus for more information about library managed ereserves. As always, the best practice is to link to public domain, library-licensed, or open-access content that is available online rather than uploading copyrighted materials to your course site when possible. If a copyrighted work is not available through one of these paths, consult LibGuides: Fair Use and Copyright: Faculty & Staff to conduct a fair use analysis. See COVID Scanning above for information on creating and making online resources available and consult a librarian at your campus for questions about specific resources.

A number of options are available for streaming media:

• Look at library licensed streaming databases (campus by campus) and see if the title you need is available. Some campuses include a guide specifically for streaming media, such as this one created at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
• Many clips are available on services such as YouTube and Vimeo. However, be aware that these clips may be removed at any time.
• Contact your multimedia librarian for questions about acquiring new films or for help locating media you need.
• Consumer streaming services such as Amazon Prime, Hulu and Netflix do not offer institutional licenses. If you would like to assign a film available only through one of these services, each student will need to subscribe to the service to view the film (many students may already have a subscription or other access to the service). One exception to this is that Netflix provides, free, educational access to a number of documentaries.
• ○ You may stream unlicensed clips from DVDs as permitted by fair use. Using only those portions of the film necessary for your pedagogical purpose and limiting access to students enrolled in the class are key to a fair use determination.

Not all books exist as ebooks and even if they do, the publisher may not offer a license to libraries or libraries might not be able to afford one. Check with your collections, acquisitions, or subject librarian. Consider reaching out to your publisher to request access for hard to access materials. CUNY libraries have purchased many new eBooks over the past few months based on need and usage, so it is worthwhile to search again for books as our e-collections are updated frequently.


Under CUNY’s Intellectual Property Policy, faculty and staff at CUNY retain the copyright in works they create, including pedagogical materials and scholarship, with some exceptions for sponsored research and commissioned work. This rule applies regardless of whether a course is taught in person or remotely, and there is a specific provision in the Policy for electronically published course materials.

While your IP rights are not impacted by remote instruction, faculty and staff involved in teaching or curricular support activities, should be aware of the ways in which digital platforms enable reuse of pedagogical content by others. Consider using a Creative Commons license to make your preferences for reuse explicit.

Support other educators by adding a Creative Commons (CC) license! But think about which works you’d still like exclusive access to. For instance, you may want to add a CC license to lecture slides for others to reuse with attribution, but keep all rights to videos of your lectures. When thinking about how to share your work, what to make available for reuse and what to reserve all rights to, consider possible scenarios in which the content you created might be used.

Many free materials that you find online are still protected by copyright. In contrast, while Open Educational Resources may be subject to copyright, they are explicitly created with the idea that they will be reused by others, often pursuant to a CC license. If you find something on the internet that you want to use for instruction, best practice is to link to the material rather than making a derivative or reposting it on another platform.