Court opinions, legislative hearings and other government documents are not copyrighted, and may be freely photocopied. The same is true of works for which the copyright has expired, and of works which prior to January 1978 were sold or disseminated without proper notice of copyright. There is a danger, however, of acting unlawfully when one photocopies without permission works which are covered by the act. Congress appreciated the impossibility of announcing in a statute an exact quantitative measure that would distinguish copying which is a fair use from copying which is an infringement. The making of a single copy of copyrighted material for a teacher's personal use in teaching, scholarship or research will almost always be a fair use.
More difficult questions rise when multiple copies are made for distribution to students.
A teacher should try to avoid making multiple photocopies of copyrighted material which is not truly important for that teacher's pedagogical needs. In any event, students receiving such photocopied material should be charged no more than is necessary to cover the cost of photocopying and processing. During congressional deliberations on the act, a group of educational associations and commercial publishers developed a set of guidelines which purport to announce the minimum reach of the fair use doctrine as applied to educational photocopying. The guidelines are set forth below. Several misconceptions about these guidelines have developed and should be dispelled.