Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

When incorporating images and content from online sources into presentation slides and distributing the slides to students in class or posting them to your onQ course site, it would be best to operate within the scope of the exception in the Copyright Act that permits the use of publicly accessible online content for educational purposes. In order to make use of this exception, the following conditions must be met: 

• the websites and content must be publicly accessible (you must be able to access the content without creating an account, logging in to a website, subscribing to a website, platform, or online service, or paying any fees); ; 
• the content must be legitimate (not infringing copies) and must have been made available to the public online by the copyright owner and must have been made available online to the public by the copyright owner (consult verified accounts and trusted websites, consider the validity of the usernames of those who posted or uploaded the content, and avoid content that is accompanied by disclaimers that state 'no copyright infringement intended');  
• the content must not be accompanied by clearly visible notices that prohibit educational or non-commercial use; 
• access to and use of the content must not be restricted by technological measures or digital locks of any kind (avoid images that have been watermarked, avoid text that cannot be downloaded or copied and pasted, and avoid music and videos that cannot be played in your geographic location); and 
• the authors and sources of the content must be acknowledged in attribution statements or credit lines whenever publicly accessible online content is incorporated into presentation slides. 

If the presentation slides are to be posted to a personal website or a publicly accessible website, permission from the copyright owners of the incorporated images and content will need to be obtained. 

For more information, please see our Categories of Content page. 

Please contact the Copyright Advisory Office if you have questions about the inclusion of images and content in presentation slides and the distribution of presentation slides: qcopy@queensu.ca.