The Digital Services Librarian is available to help with course-related copyright permission requests. When requesting assistance, please submit bibliographic and course information as soon as possible. The BYU Copyright Licensing Office has obtained blanket permission to use many educational materials for the whole campus. In the absence of a blanket license, we will attempt to acquire copies of ebooks for students to access. The final option, individual licensing 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.