What four questions related to the fair use guidelines should teachers ask before using copyrighted materials?

The four questions related to the fair use guidelines that teachers should ask before using copyrighted material are:

*What is the intended use?
*What type of work is it?
*How much of the work do you intend to use?
*What impact does this kind of use have on the market for the work?

What is the intended use?
This question is to determine the purpose and character of use. Determine if you are using it for educational purposes, and if it is noncommercial in nature. If the use is not educational, then permission for use needs to be granted. Also, commercial use would be cheating the publisher.

What type of work is it?
Determine whether the work is factual and if it contains a lot of creative or imaginative substance. If the work is primarily factual, then it is likely that the information could also be found in other places. If it is creative or imaginative, however, then using it without permission would most likely not fall under fair use.

How much of the work do you intend to use?
If you are using a work in its entirety, then it’s not likely to be fair use . . . for use to fall under “fair use”, then only a small portion should be used.

What impact does this kind of use have on the market for the work?
If the way you are using the work would serve as a substitute for someone purchasing the original, then it is not fair use. Also, if it has a negative impact on the market demand, then it most likely is not fair use.

There are a lot of stipulations for copying work created by somebody else, and sometimes it can be frustrating to have to deal with all of these stipulations. There are times that it becomes quite confusing when trying to determine whether or not something falls under fair use. Probably the most common type for a person to have to question fair use is when photocopying a document for classroom distribution. However, things such as showing a video in class or using a website for instruction also fall into this category.

While showing an old movie to a few students can be considered fair use, showing the same video for the entire student body would be questionable. By the same token, copying a portion of one page out of a magazine for article analysis in an English class may be acceptable while copying the entire magazine would not be.

At my school, the librarian handles both making photocopies and approving videos to be shown in class, so I’m very grateful for that . . . there are a lot of gray areas when determining what is and isn’t fair use.