"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:
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 APA style, an image requires a caption with an in-text citation (or a credit line) and an entry in References.
An image caption provides information about the image and credits the source of the image. Give each image a figure number (Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.).
If the image is a drawing, rendering, infographic, or other illustration, include:
If the image is a photograph of a building, include:
If the image is a photograph or reproduction of a work of art, include:
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.
At the end of the caption, credit the source of the image with a credit line, which is formatted as an in-text citation. Here's an example:
No citation is needed for personal photographs or other images you created yourself when using APA style. These images do still require a caption, but you do not need to include an in-text citation in the caption, and you do not need to include an entry for the image in your References list.