Copyright/Trademark laws?

Question

I own a postsecondary school and use several books to teach from. In the past I have had my students buy the books but we only use a few sections from each. My question is can I teach from a book the students don't purchase? Can I make copies of the pages we use so they can follow along or read a few sections at home in preparation for class lecture? How does copyright play into this? Thank you for your time. If possible please include a source for your answer!

Can I check books in and out to my students?

Answer 1

Fair Use and Teachers

Fair use explicitly allows use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Rather than listing exact limits of fair use, copyright law provides four standards for determination of the fair use exemption:

1. Purpose of use: Copying and using selected parts of copyrighted works for specific educational purposes qualifies as fair use, especially if the copies are made spontaneously, are used temporarily, and are not part of an anthology.
2. Nature of the work: For copying paragraphs from a copyrighted source, fair use easily applies. For copying a chapter, fair use may be questionable.
3. Proportion/extent of the material used: Duplicating excerpts that are short in relation to the entire copyrighted work or segments that do not reflect the "essence" of the work is usually considered fair use.
4. The effect on marketability: If there will be NO REDUCTION IN SALES because of copying or distribution, the fair use exemption is likely to apply. This is the most important of the four tests for fair use (Princeton University).
http://home.earthlink.net/~cnew/research.htm

Answer 2

Here is how it was done at a university i attended. The prof would prepare lecture notes, these could outline the text material, and provide a salient quote or two. The university held a number of copies of the textbook in the library for use of those students that miss a lecture, or otherwise need further study. That eliminates requiring way too many textbooks for students to purchase for a given class. Students always have the option of purchasing the support texts if they like.

Answer 3

You cannot copy whole sections or chapters without violating the copyright owner's rights.

Answer 4

yes they can sue you if that was their name of their Company or website first. Like if you know the show, (CAKE BOSS ) with buddy that's what happened to him. A small company he did not know about already had the name cake boss. But I don't think they sued him I am pretty sure buddy gave them money if he could take the name.