Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

Faculty and students sometimes advise each other to upload articles downloaded from library-licensed databases into AI tools for summarization, or for study purposes, such as generating study questions and dialogs about the materials. These are not public domain articles that happened to be indexed in a library database.

Many of our faculty have access to ChatGPT EDU, which creates a "walled garden" around the files, preventing them from being used for AI training and treating them as institutional data. However, our students do not yet have access to the EDU account. In addition, many students and faculty are experimenting widely with other free AI tools on the Internet and are most likely uploading all types of files. I realize we cannot stop all of this, but if we have a statement to let library patrons know the proper uses, we are hopefully at least covering our obligations here.

Could you suggest a reasonable policy statement that libraries could publicize to their patrons regarding this issue to help ensure that patrons respect author and publisher rights and that libraries will not end up in legal trouble down the road?

I am aware that students are engaging with generative AI inside and outside of the academic setting. If they enter their own work (an essay, research paper, etc.) into Chat-GPT or CoPilot for editing, or other purposes, do they forfeit any of their intellectual property rights in doing so in ways that would affect the future publication of their work?

Additionally, are there any current legal ramifications for failing to declare the use of generative AI or failing to cite AI usage? I am aware of policy, and reputation, ramifications that can vary depending on the exact situation, so I’m specifically curious about if there are any legal repercussions for doing so.

Thank you so much for your help!

We are uncertain how to proceed with further digitization of our college’s student newspapers. Currently, the newspapers published between 1948 and 2016 are digitized. They were made available online through a page hosted on the college’s website as well as the NYS Historic Newspapers database.

Since the mid-2010s, articles from the newspaper have been published simultaneously online and in the print edition distributed across campus.

The college’s administration received a complaint from a company called Copytrack regarding two images used in past issues of the paper. The college’s response was to scrub the images from the online archive of past issues and restrict access to the archives, effectively removing the entire digitized collection of its archives from the newspaper’s website.

However, since the issues in question were from 2017 and 2018, the digitized collection still remains intact on NYS Historic Newspapers, where the library has it hosted. We’re uncertain what weight this complaint from Copytrack holds and hope to digitize the remainder of the publication soon, within the bounds of copyright restrictions.

After this copyright complaint, is it advisable to leave the collection in NYS Historic Newspapers and continue adding to it, or should we plan to take it down and only digitize future copies for in-house preservation purposes?

We currently offer a service that collects older static PDFs of library/research content and provide faculty with a URL (or permalink) to that resource in our library’s digital collections. This service provides the following enhancements:

• Increases accessibility as links will always test as accessible in Brightspace (DLE/LMS)
• Enhance student discovery of library resources.
• Provide more accurate usage metrics that influence library subscription decisions.

Occasionally, we come across an old scanned PDF of a book chapter or scholarly article that we do not subscribe to.

Our question is: If we publicly offer to remediate (as best we can) published content that we do not subscribe to or own so that faculty can place an accessible version of them in their course shells, are we violating copyright? Keep in mind these materials would only be shared with students of specific courses and would be available only through the learning management system that requires a login.

[We got a question from an academic library...]

I have a question about using copyrighted materials in my classes.

A few years ago, I purchased and listened to the audio version of a Great Course called "[NAME REDACTED TO AVOID COMPLICATIONS]." Each lecture is about 30 minutes and I thought they would make a great weekly assignment in my "[NAME OF CLASS ALSO REDACTED]" class. I would have students listen to a lecture and then focus their discussion around it.

My question is, what legal ways can I share these lectures with students? I have purchased the video series at thegreatcourses.com (for $29.95). I know I can't take a screen recording of them and post on YouTube public, but could I take a screen recording and post in Brightspace? That way, they would not be able to disseminate it or access it beyond the end of the course."

PS "Brightspace" is course software (Like "BlackBoard")