Columbia University Libraries' Copyright Advisory Services maintain a Fair Use Checklist to assist users of copyrighted works in determining whether their proposed use is within the limits of fair use under US copyright law (Section 107 of the US Copyright Act).
The US Copyright Office maintains a Fair Use Index in order to track a variety of judicial decisions to help both lawyers and nonlawyers better understand the types of uses courts have previously determined to be fair—or not fair.
How can one tell if something is in the public domain? This is the central question addressed daily by the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) project.
Working over a span of nearly eight years, the University of Michigan Library received three grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to generously fund CRMS, a cooperative effort by partner research libraries to identify books in the public domain in HathiTrust. The Toolkit is a resource that aims to allow others to understand and replicate the work done by CRMS.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant Number LG- 05- 14- 0042- 14). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books page includes a comprehensive FAQ to assist researchers in determining whether a copyright has been renewed.
The University of Reading and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas collaborated to develop these databases to answer copyright questions about American and British publishing concerns and literary manuscripts.
Artists Rights Society (ARS) is the preeminent copyright, licensing, and monitoring organization for visual artists in the United States. Founded in 1987, ARS represents the intellectual property rights interests of over 50,000 visual artists and estates of visual artists from around the world (painters, sculptors, photographers, architects, and others).
Société des auteurs dans les arts graphiques et plastiques (ADAGP) is the French royalty collection and distribution society in the field of graphic and visual arts.
Both societies maintain searchable databases for the artists whose reproduction and communication rights they manage.