Deans for Impact is a national nonprofit organization working to improve how teachers are prepared. We have developed instructional materials that professors can use with their college students who are training to be teachers. Within those materials, we provide professors with background readings they can share with their students. These include articles and blog posts both excerpted and in their entirety that are freely available on the Internet, as well as excerpts from articles and books that are not freely available.

We have primarily been providing these materials for no charge to professors at institutions that work within one of our networks. In the future, we are looking to make these instructional materials more widely available and charge for access to them.

Are we going to run into any copyright or IP issues based on the way we are currently providing background readings? We have looked into some of the fair-use laws but have gotten confused as to how they apply to us because we are a non-profit entity, creating materials to be used in higher education settings for educational purposes, but are looking to charge a fee for them. Are there certain materials we can include (like excerpts of a certain length from books or articles that aren't freely available if we don't use them in their entirety) or should we stick to only articles/blog posts that are freely available?

Finally, can we use publicly available videos (e.g., youtube, vimeo) within our materials if they sit behind a paywall? If this is a violation, are there ways around this that are appropriate? If we wanted to continue using these short videos, what would we need to do to ensure we do so in alignment with existing IP rules?

-- Explain how "fair use" copyright doctrine applies to a nonprofit organization that sometimes charges fees-for-service for work using materials pulled from public domain (e.g., YouTube)