Library & Networked Information Systems

Thank-you for submitting your request/comment.

The appropriate library department should respond to you within a couple of days. Feel free to contact hunterlawlibrary@law.byu.edu if you don’t hear back after 3 working days.

BYU Law Faculty/Students – please use the priority reference form for quick research help.

Thank-you for submitting this request. You should receive a confirmation email shortly.

Do you need permission to use additional resources?

The Digital Services Librarian is available to help with course-related copyright permission requests. When requesting assistance, please submit the information below as soon as possible. It is preferable to work with authors directly, but that process can take 4-6 weeks. The alternative, processing materials through the Copyright Clearance Center, almost always involves royalties that must be paid by students.

Educational uses are not, per se, Fair Uses. An educational use is most likely to be considered fair when it is one-time, last-minute, does not involve fiction or drama*, and is limited in scope. In those circumstances, obtaining timely permission is recognized to be difficult. But even the Fair Use of  copyrighted items should be reported to the Digital Services Librarian for record-keeping.

Please be aware that the Law School never assumes that using teaching materials more than once will be considered fair. And “consumables” (such as worksheets or problem sets) are never eligible for Fair Use.

Fortunately, in the United States many primary legal materials are deemed to belong to the public domain. Federal and State statutes, regulations and case opinions are increasingly available online as well as through LexisNexis and Westlaw. It is also generally reasonable to link to openly-available secondary resources without asking permission or paying royalties. Taken together with available LexisNexis and Westlaw resources, it is often possible to completely avoid making actual copies of most materials needed for preparing and teaching law classes.

Faculty should contact the help desk for assistance in preparing an interactive syllabus with links to required or recommended readings for any Law School class (“deep” links to LexisNexis or Westlaw resources may be included). The form below should be used to request permission processing for paper or electronic copying.

* A separate provision, §110 of the Copyright Act, exempts the use of many audiovisual formats for face-to-face classroom teaching. In interpreting §1201, the U.S. Librarian of Congress has ruled that capturing short excerpts of digital works for use in education can be a permissible circumvention of technical protection measures.

Quick FAQs

More FAQs

Physical Reference Desk

Due to COVID-19, the reference desk is closed for the safety of our librarians, student employees, and patrons. However, many virtual reference options are available to both the BYU Law community and other BYU and community patrons to receive reference services.

Submit a Reference Question

Patrons may use the Contact Us form to submit reference questions. We will attempt to answer reference questions within two business days. We remind you that we cannot offer legal advice. We can provide answers to brief, factual research questions and resource inquiries. For example, we can help identify and locate legal materials or provide guidance in using legal resources or tools. BYU Law faculty and BYU Law students will receive first priority for responses.

Call

To receive reference services over the phone, call 801-422-6658, and you will be transferred to a law student reference assistant or a reference librarian if one is available. The hours that reference services generally are available via the phone are listed here. It is not recommended that you leave a voicemail. Rather, call back during the times reference services over the phone are available or email us your reference question at reference@law.byu.edu.

Chat

Patrons may chat with a reference librarian, if one is available. Librarians strive to be available by chat 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday, except for federal and state holidays. Click the image below to access the chat feature, if a librarian is available to chat, or click the image below to access the Contact Us form if the chat feature is offline and not available.

J. Reuben Clark Law School and Hunter Law Library

The Law School is committed to the enforcement and protection of copyrights as both a legal and an ethical imperative. A copyright is a set of exclusive rights that vests in the author of an original work of authorship (including literary, musical, dramatic, pictorial, sculptural, and motion picture works). The copyright attaches upon the work’s creation (when it is “fixed in a tangible medium of expression”); current law does not require the formalities of registration or of a copyright notice such as the “©” symbol. The exclusive rights covered by copyright include the right to (1) copy or reproduce the work or portions of the work (including by making electronic copies); (2) prepare “derivative works” based on the original; (3) distribute copies of the work or portions of the work (including by electronic means); and (4) publicly perform or display the work.

Any faculty member, staff member, or student who intends to copy or distribute any material that is not in the public domain and is, therefore, protected by copyright must first receive copyright clearance from the law school’s Copyright Coordinator under the procedures set forth here, unless the copyright is held by that faculty member, staff member, or student. Copyright clearance is required even if the material is believed to be covered by the doctrine of fair use, and even if permission has already been secured from the holder of the copyright by the individual faculty member, staff member, or student. “Copying” and “distributing” include not only making and distributing hard copies, but also making any digital or electronic copies, posting such copies on the internet or the law school’s web page, or distributing copies via e-mail.

Any faculty member, staff member, or student seeking copyright clearance must contact the law school’s Copyright Coordinator. Requests for clearance should be submitted on a form approved by the Copyright Committee. The request should be submitted as far in advance of the use of the material as is reasonably possible (preferably at least one month in advance). The form for the written request may be completed in hard copy or on the law school’s web page, and will require the person submitting the request to (1) identify the copyrighted works in question by author, title, publication date, journal citation (where applicable), publisher (if known), and ISBN/ISSN (if known); (2) describe the nature of any copying and/or distribution (e.g., hard copies, scanning, uploading, etc.); (3) identify the name of the course and number of students to whom the material will be distributed; (4) indicate whether the person submitting the request has ever previously received permission to use the material in question, and attach any documents memorializing such permission; and (5) indicate whether the person submitting the request believes that a fair use privilege applies, and provide a brief justification for such privilege.

Many single copies made purely for research purposes will be covered by the doctrine of fair use, particularly where only a portion of the original work is copied. For such uses, the Copyright Coordinator may provide clearances that may cover certain uses, without requiring specific clearance requests for each individual copy.

If a faculty member disagrees with a decision of the Copyright Coordinator, appeal may be made to the Associate Dean for Faculty & Curriculum.