About Copyright

An important part of the OSCR mission is using technological resources to help students successfully complete their course work. Often, students use multimedia that they've found online to illustrate a concept in a paper, presentation, or project, and they turn to OSCR for guidance on adhering to Fair Use guidelines. This webpage will help you determine what you can legally use and what you should avoid using without first obtaining permission from the copyright holder.

We at OSCR are very concerned about the issues of illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) downloading and copyright infringement. We're not gonna sugar-coat it: illegally downloading copyrighted materials is stealing. Owners of copyrights are very aggressive in their pursuit of violators and The University of Arizona takes it very seriously when there are allegations of illegal file sharing using university networks and computers.

We know the issue is a confusing one with lots of legal gray areas. To help you understand the basics a little better, we've compiled some information we think will make the whole thing a lot clearer:

But if you're ever stumped about whether what you want to do is legal or not, just STOP what you're doing and contact us. You've got a friend in OSCR: our staff wants to help keep you out of trouble. If we don't know the answer, we'll put you in touch with people who do.

And to help you get started down the righteous path of legally downloading tunes, we want to introduce you to Ruckus, an online music service available to ALL UA students for free. As long as you're a UA student with a UA email address, you can download to your computer from a library of over 2 million songs. To get started go, to the OSCR Ruckus Portal and register! Ruckus does not work with the Mac operating system or with certain mobile devices, such as iPods and downloads will only work as long as you're enrolled as a student.

UA also has an agreement with Network Music Library allowing free usage of many of the materials on their site as long as they're used only for coursework or in your portfolio of student work. Simply preview their collection online and then check out the CD you want from OSCR's Multimedia Learning Lab. For your convenience, Network Music Library's sound effects collection is available as MP3 files at http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/soundeffects/ .

And... there are lots of other cool sites, featuring music, videos, and more. Many of these sites offer free, legal downloads: