Recently Asked Questions (RAQs)

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.

[In 2019, we got some questions about Swank movie licenses, streaming services, and schools, and posted the answer here: /raq/showing-movies-school. It’s now 2025, and with new content in the Swank licenses, we got this follow-up question from a librarian working with a school district…]

This is an excellent response[1] and I shared it with the district I’m having conversations with. However, the SWANK Movie License now states “the license enables use of any legal formats licensed for home use only.” Can they legally put that on their movie license?

A high school band has purchased music with permission to perform. The music teacher has requested that the performance be shared on the school's website. From my understanding, the performance may be shared live / streamed (permission to broadcast) via the school's web page but may not be recorded and then posted to the website. The public performance relates to the site/building and not to the World Wide Web.

Please confirm whether my understanding is correct.

Is it a violation of Copyright Law to publicly share a video recording of a DJ playing music from his music library for a public library archive and make this available for on-demand viewing?