As a university student, you will be expected to use a range of resources during your studies including books, journals, websites, online resources, images, music and video. Most of these resources are protected by UK copyright Law. Copyright law applies to library resources, course materials and online or web-based materials.
As a student it is important to understand the principles of copyright and how the law works in the UK. You can read about the basics of copyright law in the What is Copyright? section of this guide. The legal framework and information about what kinds of items are covered by copyright law are laid out in the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.
The University of Sunderland hold several educational licences which enable staff and students to legally use copyrighted resources in the course of teaching and learning. Please read the section about Educational Licences for more information.
The educational licences are underpinned by copyright exceptions, so, where a particular work is not covered by a licence, you may still be able to copy limited sections of it by using one of the exceptions. The law has provided a number of exceptions to copyright to enable students to do this legally. It is worth noting that these exceptions only apply if no other legal agreement exists (such as the CLA, ERA, CC licences).
Most of the library resources you use at University will be made available to you under the terms of one of the University Copyright licences. Library resources are materials that are available to borrow or access from the library or online via Canvas, your library reading lists, or the library website.
These resources include electronic and physical copies of books, journals, magazines, newspaper articles, reports, case studies, films, television and radio broadcasts and electronic databases. Most (but not all) of these items are made available to you under the terms and conditions of the CLA HE Licence which allows authorised users (including students) to access the resources. You can use the CLA Permissions checker to find out out if the item is covered by the licence.
it is important to remember that there are limits around how much you can photocopy, print, scan, download or reproduce in your own work.
Photocopying/scanning from books and journals in the library collections
As authorised users, under the terms of the CLA HE Licence, students can access and make a single copy of,
Where a digital publication is not organised in a similar way to conventional printed items, you are advised to refer to the fair dealing information and exercise your best judgement to copy reasonable extracts.
When using online subscription resources, the amount that you can copy, download and print is often set by individual publishers and limits are built into their sites. VLE Books and EBook Central for example, have built in limits as to how much you can legally copy and print. Once your allowance has been used you will not be able to go over it. Any materials that you download from online subscriptions are to be used for your personal study only and should not be further reproduced or shared.