Revised Copyright Statement for Syllabus

Under the Fair Use guidelines, this learning material is made available to students enrolled in the course for private study, scholarship, and research. Further distribution, transmission, release, or duplication in any form and by any means, including electronic media, of this material is prohibited by the copyright law of the United States (Title 17 US Code). 

Guiding Principles for Streaming Media to Canvas

Streaming media through Canvas for study, scholarship, or research acts as an extension of the classroom to provide access to required course materials in support of the academic mission of the University of Puget Sound. This service, provided under the direction of faculty, complies with the Fair Use provisions of US copyright law (Title 17, US Code) under the following conditions:

• All streaming media on Canvas must be required for the course with access restricted to enrolled students in a designated class. Students will log into Canvas with their Puget Sound ID and password.
• Media will not be retained indefinitely on the server.  After a period of non-use media will be archived and then removed.
• Media in physical format must be legally acquired by the library. If media is not owned by the library, faculty may submit a request for purchase.
• A citation to the streaming media along with the following copyright statement must be included:

Under the Fair Use guidelines, this learning material is made available to students enrolled in the course for private study, scholarship, and research. Further distribution, transmission, release, or duplication in any form and by any means, including electronic media, of this material is prohibited by the copyright law of the United States (Title 17 US Code). 

• Streaming media governed by a contract (typical with resources that are rented through personal accounts and not owned, e.g., Netflix, Amazon), is the guiding regulation, not copyright law. If the end user license agreement states that the service is for personal use only, it may not be streamed in a classroom setting or on Canvas.

The Library features a number of licensed streaming video collections. When planning your syllabus, we recommend that you check these collections first to see if there are films that will work for your class.

If you intend to use feature films in your class, consider asking your students to pay for content from a streaming provider such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Vimeo, etc. 

Consult an online video aggregator such as JustWatch.com to see which titles are available on major commercial streaming providers.

Below is a small sampling of streaming videos in the public domain. See also links on the previous page, Getting Started. To find more titles, try Wikipedia's  List of Films in the Public Domain in the United States and Infodigi's Public Domain Resource.

For DVDs owned by the library, once the library has determined that the content is not available to license, we will coordinate with Media Services to have the DVD version loaded on a campus server if the content is needed for students outside of the classroom.

Regarding having personal copies of DVDs, or DVDs borrowed from other libraries, loaded on the campus servers, as much as possible we need to avoid doing that.  It is best practice for material to be licensed or purchased by the University so we can be sure that we have the appropriate rights to the content.  Personal copies will only be utilized if the material cannot be acquired by the institution, and we’ve been able to do our due diligence in determining that.

DVDs and other media formats can be checked out by faculty for viewing in face-to-face classroom teaching. If you do not have access to a DVD player in the classroom, contact Media Services to reserve equipment for class on a specific day and time.

For DVDs not owned by the library, search Primo for availability through Summit.

The Tacoma Public Library provides access to Hoopla, an online streaming video service for public libraries offering feature films and documentaries. If you have a TPL library card, you can create an account using your library barcode number and an email address.  With your account, you can check out and stream (or download if you don’t have access to WiFi) up to 10 items per month.  The Hoopla license allows you to borrow and view content during the designated loan period for your own, personal, non-commercial use only (“Allowed Use”) and, during that limited loan period only.  For more information, check the Tacoma Public Library's website.

Tacoma Public Library also offers access to the public library version of Kanopy. With your TPL account you may have access to up to 10 videos per month.

Other public library systems often have access to these services, so be sure to check whichever public library system you belong to.