Our friends in the Legislature created law that allows educators to use copywritten material in their classrooms—it’s called Fair Use. There are restrictions of course. With those restrictions comes an hyper-complicated set of rules that you need a team of lawyers to decipher.
There are some good groups out there trying to make these rules as easy to understand as possible. Try these if you need some help:
- The Music Library Association at James Madison University has one of the shortest, but thorough, explanations on classroom photocopying.
- the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center has more than you ever wanted to know on this topic
- Straight from the horse’s mouth – the U.S. Copyright Office writeup on fair use
