Linking to Copyrighted Material in Moodle

Limit the amount of copyrighted material posted to Moodle.

Small portions of material may meet “fair use” guidelines. As a general principle, use only as much of a work as is needed, in compliance with the four factors of the fair use exception to copyright law, to meet your educational objectives — unless you obtain a license or written permission to use more. More information and tools for determining “fair use” is on the Library’s Copyright LibGuide.

Use links to legal copies of materials, rather than creating and uploading copies to Moodle.

For how to link to various library online materials, see – Moodle LibGuide Instructions.pdf

Reasons linking is preferable include the following:

• You avoid inadvertent copyright violation, since you are pointing to the document on the original server, in its original context.
• You comply with library subscription terms. Copying and posting of full-text is actually prohibited for some library online resources, but linking to them from Moodle is okay.
• The author of the article will know how many times it has actually been accessed. This use data is often referred to as an “altmetric”; altmetrics are one measure of an article’s reach or impact. If one person downloads it and passes it around, it looks like the article only received a single use. But if that person shares the link, the number of actual uses is recorded each time the link is accessed.

Delete copyrighted content after the class ends.

If you decide to post a full PDF of a document for a particular course, it is recommended that you delete it at the end of the course. This limited use (for the term of the course) supports that your use is more likely to qualify as “fair use.”

Consider this a teachable moment.

Consider posting only the citations to articles available online through the library. Have students find the articles using library databases, so that they can practice the research process that they will need throughout college and after they graduate.