The resources here only provide a brief overview of copyright and should not be considered legal advice. If you are planning on using archival materials for a project, it is best to consult with a copyright expert or seek legal council.
Copyright gives the creator of a work the exclusive right to reproduce, perform, distribute and creative derivatives of the original work. In order to use a copyrighted work, one must ask permission or obtain a license. Most archival materials are copyrighted, unless they are within the public domain. Even if an archive has the physical items, the original copyright holders usually maintain the rights, whether it is published or unpublished. In some cases, materials in an archive may be restricted from use due to sensitive personal or cultural information. It is typically up to the researcher to obtain the correct permission or licensure unless their project falls under fair use.
The UNC Libraries do not hold the copyrights for much of the material that is in our physical possession. The UNC Libraries digitize and publish online selected materials from its collections so that they can be discovered and used.
While UNC Libraries can provide guidance on copyright for materials in its collections, it is ultimately the responsibility of the user to make the final determination about the legality of re-using materials from library collections. If you have questions about library policies in general or about the copyright status of a specific item, please contact the Wilson Library Research & Instructional Services department: wilsonlibrary@unc.edu.
Someone who wants to reproduce the material, distribute it, or make any of the other uses associated with copyright must get permission from the rights holder if that use exceeds the limits defined in a copyright exception. Note that under the current law, creative work that is eligible for copyright protection receives that protection as soon as it is fixed in a tangible form of expression. Because registration and notice of copyright are no longer required, it can sometimes be difficult to identify the rights holder.
The rights holder’s exclusive rights are the rights of:
Under U.S. law, in certain circumstances, creators of works of visual art have moral rights as well. In order to facilitate the re-use of our digital collections in personal, scholarly, and commercial projects, the library is making an effort to assign simple and clear rights statements to most items in its digital collections. These statements describe the copyright status, under current U.S. law, as far as it is known by the UNC Library.
For more about copyright and collections, please see the information provided by the UNC Libraries Scholarly Communications Office.
If exception means "In this circumstance, it doesn't apply," then copyright exception means "Though normally all work is protected under copyright, this work's circumstance means you don't have to get permission from the owner."
Examples of copyright exceptions include:
Many copyright exceptions are limited and detailed in their scope.
Fair use is a part of the copyright statute (17 USC 107) that provides a flexible approach to copyright exceptions for a wide variety of useful societal purposes. Such purposes for using fair use include (but are not limited to): criticism, comments, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Four factors are used to analyze whether a use is fair use:
Because fair use is a "flexible" application of copyright exception, it can be dangerous. If you decide to use fair use, clearly document your reasoning and store it with the rest of your copyright licenses. This could help protect you against a claim of copyright infringement.
Works in the public domain are available for use without permission or license. Some works are always in the public domain, such as works created by the federal government. In other cases, works enter the public domain after the copyright expires. For example, any work published in the United States more than 95 years ago is now in the public domain. Unpublished works enter the public domain 70 years after the copyright holder dies or in the case of unknown authorship, 120 years after the creation of the work.