Graham Resource Center Research Guide: Intellectual Property + Fair Use

Via the ARL, a concise history of copyright law in the United States, dating from the advent of the printing press in England to the present. This history focuses on successive individual court cases, working papers, and legislation.

A simple guide created by UC Berkeley, explaining the advantages of managing one's own intellectual property rights. This covers adding an addendum to any author's contracts, and links to other resources.

Based at the Univeristy of Nottingham, RoMEO summarizes publishers’ conditions and categorizes publishers by colours, indicating level of author rights. You can also use use RoMEO to find out if your publishers’ copyright rules allow you to deposit in
your institutional repository.

A clear, simple tool for assessing whether works are still under copyright.

The Association of Research Libraries' clear and easy-to-use statement of fair and reasonable approaches to fair use, developed by and for librarians who support academic inquiry and higher education. The Code was developed in partnership with the Center for Social Media and the Washington College of Law at American University.

The ARL Code's basics, in a nutshell.

The Fair Use Evaluator is a tool help you better determine the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code. You can collect, organize & archive the information you might need to support a fair use evaluation. Provide you with a time-stamped, PDF document for your records,which could prove valuable, should you ever be asked by a copyright holder to provide your fair use evaluation and the data you used to support it. A joint endeavor between Michael Brewer and the ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy.

The Center for Media & Social Impact's study on mashup culture, video production, and corporate practices that can curb free speech. For your consideration: "The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances."

"There’s no right or wrong Creative Commons license. That said, some licenses are more appropriate for some applications than others–for example, only the free licenses (CC0, BY, BY-SA) should be used for public sector information..." This page offers examples of users of each CC license, as well as the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, with information about why each licensor selected the license she did.

A clear explanation of CC'S "three-layer" licensing (Legal Code, Human Readable, and Machine-Readable), and a concise summary of each type of license offered.

From video to blog post to image to dataset, this guide helps users mark their preferred license. Licensing a derivative work and noting third-party content are covered, as well.