MID Thesis Guide

"Fair use" is a copyright law doctrine that permits the reproduction or other use of a copyrighted work, without the copyright owner’s permission, for purposes such as criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching and research. The Copyright Act does not specify which uses are fair, but rather establishes a four-factor balancing test for courts to employ on a case-by-case basis. The fair use standards, embodied in section 107 of the Copyright Act, are:

• The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• The nature of the copyrighted work;
• The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
• The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.

Although educational purposes favor a judgment of fair use, all educational purposes do not automatically qualify as fair use. Information about applying the fair use guidelines can be found on many websites, including the following:

Sometimes, an image or other copyrighted material is simply not available in open access form. How can you include these materials in your thesis? The following answer is excerpted from Crews' Copyright and Your Dissertation or Thesis article:

"Especially for photographs, drawings, paintings, and other images, consider using small size “thumbnail” images and low-resolution reproductions. Use black-and-white versions of color images if they will suffice for your scholarly purposes . . .That option is hardly ideal, but it is more likely to be within fair use."

Even when you're confident that your use of an image is "fair," it is essential that you properly cite and attribute it. 

In Chicago style, an image requires a caption with a footnote or endnote and an entry in the Bibliography.

An image caption provides information about the image and a footnote or endnote that credits the source of the image. Give each image a figure number (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, etc.).

If the image is a drawing, rendering, infographic, or other illustration, include:

• the title of the image
• the name of the artist or illustrator
• the date the image was created

If the image is a photograph of a building, include:

• the name of the building
• the name of the architect
• the date the building was completed
• the location of the building
• the name of the photographer
• the date the photograph was taken

If the image is a photograph or reproduction of a work of art, include:

• the title of the artwork
• the name of the artist
• the date the artwork was created
• the name of the owner of the artwork (often a museum)
• the name of the photographer
• the date the photograph was taken

If you don’t see all of this information in the caption of the image or the text around it, look for a separate list of image credits. This list is often called List of Illustrations, Illustration Credits, Image Credits, or simply Credits. In books, it may be either at the beginning or at the end of the book.

Note: Museums rarely credit an individual photographer. You can cite the museum as the corporate creator of the photograph.

At the end of the caption, insert a footnote or endnote citing the book, website or other source where you found the image. Here's an example: