Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Using copyright material in education
Copyright in 3 minutes A guide for staff
What is copyright?
Copyright gives legal protection to original work of the following types:
- literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works
- sound recordings
- films (and videos)
- broadcasts (including cable and satellite programmes)
- typographical arrangements of published works
Copyright arises automatically once the work is recorded in writing or some other form, and it gives the copyright holder exclusive right to:
- copy the work
- issue copies of the work to the public
- perform, show or play the work in public
- to communicate the work to the public (by broadcast, or by electronic transmission)
It is an infringement to do any of the above without the permission of the copyright holder. However, copyright law includes several statutory exceptions to these exclusive rights. If you want more information about these exceptions and how to use copyrighted work in this way, please read this guide.
We have a series of guides for different kinds of copyrighted material and how to use them. Please look below for the section relevant to your use and there will be more detailed guidance.
If you want to use digital copies of book chapters or journal articles as part of a course or teaching, you can contact the Digitisation service at digitisation@leedsbeckett.ac.uk. We can supply digitised links with accessibility features such as read aloud adding. All extracts must be within the license extent limits of one chapter from the same book or 10%, whichever is greater, and two journal articles from the same issue per course. Also make sure that when encouraging students to use these digitisations, you always use the link rather than downloading a copy. Downloaded copies are meant to be only for personal use as to comply with our copyright license, we need to track usage of digitisations.
If you want a journal article or book chapter for personal use, you can request one using our Request It! Service. The same is true for if you're putting together a systematic review as we can source copies for you, however please contact the Academic Librarian team as soon as possible. We'll need to make sure you're building the costs for the articles into your funding bids and will want to talk to you about your best options for receiving digitised files.
When using copyrighted material, you always should seek permission from the copyright holder to do so. This includes images.
Using public domain images and Creative Commons images is a good alternative as they allow you to use them for free. However you must abide by the terms of the license or you could be fined for breaking the terms. Read the terms of the image license, but best practice is to always attribute the provenance of the image.
For more information on using images, please visit our image guide.
As with any other creative content, there's best practice for using social media from a copyright point of view. It varies platform to platform, so please read our social media guide for more information on the main social media outlets.
Copyright concerns around audiovisual content vary substantially depending on the content in question and the use you intend to put it to. You can find out more in our guide on audiovisual content.
Please email the Copyright Advice Service if you want advice about a specific use case and we'll be happy to help. You can reach us at digitisation@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
At present, AI isn't covered under any copyright exceptions. As such, you should avoid putting any copyrighted material into an LLM as the copyright holders did not consent to this use of their material. If using AI software, ideally use software which does not add any submitted data to the LLM's training data. Please read our guide.
When writing and submitting your thesis for assessment, you're covered under the copyright exception covering examination. However if you wish to do anything subsequently with your thesis (e.g. deposit in the library repository), you will require permission to use any copyrighted material contained within your thesis. Please read our guide for more information.
