Images: Copyright

Fair Use and Multimedia Guidelines

Exercise caution in using digital material downloaded from the Internet for educational purposes. There is a mixture of copyright protection online, and just because you have access to the material does not mean that it can be reproduced or reused without permission.

Limitations on the amount of the copyrighted work for multimedia include:

• No more than 5 images by an artist or photographer, and no more than 10% or 15 images (whichever is less) from a published or collective work.
• Up to 10% or 3 minutes (whichever is less) of the total motion media.
• Up to 10% but not in excess of 30 seconds of music and lyrics from an individual musical work.

If you plan to replicate or reproduce beyond these limitations, you must seek permission from the copyright holder.

*Text adapted from the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia. See the full document by clicking on the link in the adjacent column.

Still unsure if you are protected under Fair Use Guidelines? The Fair Use Evaluator may be a helpful tool. 

Over the last few years, the evolution of generative AI has led to the emergence of AI image generators that allow users to create unique images from text descriptions using artificial intelligence. Some generative AI tools have been trained on large datasets of images and text, enabling them to translate textual prompts from users into new visual representations. The images created using these tools can be downloaded, but they are not published or reproducible in the AI platform.

Current copyright law only recognizes humans as creators. One of the legal rights associated with copyright is the right to be acknowledged as the creator of a work. While the U.S. Copyright Office’s - i.e., the department of the Library of Congress that administers copyright registration in the United States - official position is that questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, the Office also states that appraisals of whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs merit copyright protection must be decided on a case-by-case basis. To provide additional information on the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidelines about the copyrightability of outputs generated by AI systems., the current advice of the Office on this topic is adapted below: 

As a general rule, a work can only be protected by copyright in the United States if there is a human author who exercised ‘sufficient creative control’ over the final product. As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship (U.S. Copyright Office, 2025).’”  A human may also “modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection (U.S. Copyright Office, 2025).”

Most legal scholars agree that inputting simple prompts is insufficient to make a user the author of the AI-generated output. Considering this, it is possible that content generated by AI may not be eligible for copyright protection if a human author does not select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative and substantive way. Unfortunately, the amount of human input needed for copyright protection is currently ill defined. As AI tools do not currently have a legal status and cannot own copyright, it is the human contributor who would own copyright if their interactions with AI recommended the product of their work for copyright protection.