Copyright Guide: Fair Use

The Fair Use Doctrine (section 107 of U.S. Copyright law) is a part of the Copyright Act of 1976 and is based on a history of judicial decisions that recognized that some unauthorized use of copyrighted materials were "fair uses."

Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. It also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
• The nature of the copyrighted work
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

For help determining if your use of copyrighted materials is a fair use the USF Tampa Library has created a checklist linked below.  Please feel free to contact your librarian with questions or for help with the checklist, or obtain legal advice from USF General Counsel.

Some other links that you may find useful:

Fair Use INCLUDES:

• quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment
• quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author’s observations
• use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied
• summary, with brief quotations, in a news report
• reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy
• reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson
• reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports
• incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported

Fair Use does NOT include

• copying an entire textbook or large portions of a textbook to avoid paying for it
• scanning and distributing an entire article for non-academic purposes
• copying and reusing an article every semester for a class
• copying music, software, articles, or books and placing it/them on a shared network drive or on the internet for downloading
• copying a movie from one format (VHS, DVD, etc.) and reformatting it in another (DVD, Blue-ray, datafile, etc.)