Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889. Digital images courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.
Using a course website or a university-supported Learning Management System (LMS), such as Canvas, to make instructional materials available to students can raise many copyright issues. These systems can be used to provide a wide range of materials, from articles and book chapters to sound recordings and visual images. However, such materials may be posted and shared only in a manner consistent with copyright law, which gives legal protection to nearly all text, images, audiovisual recordings, and other materials, whether available on the Internet or in any other medium.
Instructional materials may be posted to a LMS or a course website under any of the following circumstances.
Images in the SIA Libraries' licensed databases may be used for educational purposes only: teaching, lectures at scholarly institutions, class papers and presentations, educational websites restricted to SIA users. Images may not be used for publication unless copyright has been cleared or public domain status has been verified. Works employed in a classroom setting generally fall under fair use.
Showing or “performing” a motion picture at the institute can be important for teaching, but the performance must be made in compliance with copyright law. One of the rights of the copyright owner in the film is the right to make a “public performance” of it. Therefore, the performance of a copyrighted film must be made only with permission from the copyright owner or consistent with one of the exceptions or limitations in the copyright law.
Nevertheless, copyright law includes several possibilities for properly showing copyrighted audiovisual works.
Some DVDs in the library collection have been purchased with educational rights. You can search the library catalog for
Keyword -- educational rights + Location -- New York Library + Collections -- Multimedia
A performance may not be “public” if the place is closed to the public, and the audience is not a “substantial” number of persons. Therefore:
The smaller the viewing group, the less likely it will be a public performance.
Gathering a large group of friends or using a common room in a residence hall can make the performance “public."
Copyright protection does not last forever, and when the copyright has expired, the work may be used without copyright restriction. For example, any work published in the U.S. before 1923 is in the public domain and may be used freely.
The Internet Archive and other organizations facilitate finding and using many films and other works that are in the public domain.
Additional sources of films that are in the public domain include: Festival Films; Desert Island Films; Reel Media International; BuyOut Footage; and OpenFlix.
Works created by the federal government are not protected by copyright and are in the public domain. However, works commissioned by the federal government may have copyright protection. Also, works produced by state, local, or foreign governments may have copyright protection. Federal government works in the public domain could include many military films and NASA space exploration footage.
The law of fair use provides an exception to the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. For more information concerning the law of fair use, please see Fair Use under the Copyright & Permissions Tab. In most situations, fair use requires careful application and judgment calls; consequently, the other opportunities outlined above are usually preferable to undertaking an analysis of fair use.
All Library Guides by Sotheby's Institute of Art New York Library are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 3rd-party content including, but not limited to images and linked items, are subject to their own license terms.
