Copyright and Permissions

The official source for copyright in the United States. Includes publications, applications for copyright registration, links to the law, and more.

Originally created by Georgia Harper, the Copyright Crash Course (CCC) provides an in-depth explanation of how to use and manage copyrights.

The Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Site offers a thorough legal understanding of copyright and its related issues. Run by the Stanford University Libraries in collaboration with Justia, NOLO and others.

Although oriented towards the University of California community, this site explains the concept of copyright, fair use, the public domain, how to manage your own copyright and more.

An online tool created by Michael Brewer and the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy, which can help you understand whether something is under copyright.

An interactive tool from the ALA Copyright Advisory Network that can assist in evaluating the "fairness" of a use under the U.S. Copyright Code.

A worksheet created by Kenneth D. Crews and Dwayne K. Butler that assists with the assessment of the four factors that determines fair use.

Fair Use Week is an annual celebration that is intended to "highlight and promote the opportunities presented by fair use."

A quick tool (for works published in the U.S.) to determine whether a work is protected by copyright. From Michael Brewer and the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy.

HathiTrust is a nonprofit organization that partners with academic and research libraries to digitize over 17 million items. Many of these are in the public domain.

Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks, all of which are in the public domain.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School promotes research and scholarship on the public domain and its contributions to society at large.

This tool from Stanford Medicine enables discovery of medical images from a variety of different sources. One of the great features of this tool is the way that they clearly indicate the reuse rights for the images.

This collection, housed at the University of Utah has over 22,000 freely available digital materials for health sciences education. Each image includes a "Rights" field with a link that indicates how the image may be used. Most are licensed under various CC licenses.

This open access biomedical search engine draws upon PubMed Central articles, images from the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine collection, and several other sources. Images include charts, graphs, clinical images and more. You can find information about the rights associated with each image by reviewing the copyright license link (found below the image on the detailed view page). Additionally, you can filter your results by license type (e.g., attribution, attribution noncommercial, etc.) to ensure that you're only seeing images that are licensed under CC.

PHIL provides access to several image collections from the CDC, which are organized by topic or audience (e.g., health care providers, teachers, students, etc.). Most images are in the public domain unless indicated otherwise; you'll see a note about "Copyright Restrictions" at the bottom of each detailed view page. You can also use the "Advanced Search" option to limit your search to public domain images.

Over 6500 images that are available copyright-free in the public domain (unless noted otherwise) covering topics such as plants, natural resources, lab research and more.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Photo Library collections "reflect NOAA’s broad mission of advancing science 'from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the Sun.'” These images are in the public domain.

Most NASA content (images, audio, video, and computer files) is not subject to copyright. There may be some third-party content shared on NASA's site; these images will be marked identified as copyright protected with the name of the copyright holder

This searchable database includes more than 3 million 2D and 3D images of art and artifacts from the Smithsonian collection. These digital items were released into the public domain as Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which means you can use, adapt and share them without asking permission from the Smithsonian Institute. However, you still need to include the appropriate citations.

The Art Institute of Chicago shared over 50,000 images of works in its collection under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. The AIC provides information on how to search its collection as well as the appropriate way to cite its images.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art made over 492,000 works available through its Open Access Initiative in 2017. This initiative made all images of public-domain artworks and basic data on all accessioned works in its collection available for unrestricted use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). Includes information on how to use this collection.