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Copyright Resources

Guide to copyright for the UMass Chan community including author rights, reusing material for teaching and research, and Creative Commons licenses.

Copyright Basics

"Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship as soon as an author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. In copyright law, there are a lot of different types of works, including paintings, photographs, illustrations, musical compositions, sound recordings, computer programs, books, poems, blog posts, movies, architectural works, plays, and more." (U.S. Copyright Office)

A copyright owner has the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

  • reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords
  • prepare derivative works based upon the work
  • distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending
  • perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works. In the case of sound recordings by means of a digital audio transmission
  • display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work

The current term of copyright for an original work of authorship is the life of the author plus 70 years.

Your can learn more about the basics of copyright from the "What is copyright?" site of the U.S. Copyright Office.

The Role of Copyright

The role of copyright in the flow of research is undergoing dramatic and exciting change. The options for scholarly communication have never been broader or more effective. You'll find discussion of copyright woven all through important aspects of research and teaching, such as:

  • the training of AI and use of AI output
  • the use of others' works in the classroom, in fieldwork, and the laboratory
  • building on the works of others to create new works
  • open source software development
  • use and reuse of datasets
  • Creative Commons licensing
  • open access to research results and its acceleration of the pace of scientific discovery
  • the digitization of books in the public domain and digital access to works still in print as well as orphan works
  • the resulting opportunities to discover knowledge that's been hard to access in the past

(from Copyright Crash Course, Colleen Ryan, University of Texas Libraries)