Copyright is a legal protection afforded original creators of literary and artistic works fixed in a tangible medium of expression.¹⁹ When including copyrighted materials in your speeches—such as reproductions of graphs or photographs, a video or sound clip, and so forth—you must determine when and if you need permission to use such works.

When a work is copyrighted, you may not reproduce, distribute, or display it without permission from the copyright holder or you will be liable for copyright infringement. For any work created from 1978 to the present, the copyright is good for the author’s lifetime plus fifty years. After that time, unless extended, the work falls into the public domain, which means that anyone may reproduce it. Not subject to copyright are federal (but not state or local) government publications, common knowledge, and select other categories.

Copyright laws are designed to protect intellectual property—the ownership of an individual’s creative expression. As publishing attorney Steve Gillen explains:

Copyright law concerns authorship or expression, i.e., words and images, not the underlying facts or ideas. . . . Facts, statistics, and concepts can be recited without permission [though failure to cite the source for them constitutes plagiarism unless they are common knowledge]. What you cannot do is copy or plagiarize the original or creative manner in which the original data was expressed.

An exception to the prohibitions of copyright restrictions is the doctrine of fair use, which permits the limited use of copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of scholarship, criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and research.²⁰ This means that when preparing speeches for the classroom, you have much more latitude to use other people’s creative work (with credit in all cases) without seeking their permission. For example, as long as you acknowledged your source, you could use a song from Katy Perry’s latest album as part of an in-class presentation. Different rules apply to the professional speaker, whose use of copyrighted materials is considered part of a for-profit “performance.” In this event, you would need to obtain a performance license from a performing rights society such as ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers).

The same principles of fair use that apply to music apply to any graphics you might have decided to project during your presentation. Bear in mind, however, that while the data within a table or chart may not be copyrighted, its particular visual arrangement usually is.²¹ Thus, you must accurately credit both the source of the data as well as the creator of its graphic display. For example, suppose that for a speech on women in the sciences you locate a graph in Time magazine that visually illustrates the percentage of men versus women who receive PhDs in the sciences and engineering. The source of the data is a federal government agency, which falls within the public domain. However, as the creator of the graph, Time magazine owns the copyright for this particular display of the data.

The long and short of it? If you are a professional public speaker who makes use of copyrighted materials in your speeches, you must obtain copyright clearance. For speeches created for one-time use in the classroom or for other nonprofit, educational purposes, accurately crediting your sources will often suffice. (For more on copyright, visit the U.S. Copyright Office online at www.copyright.gov.)