Abstract:

The intellectual property laws protect a wide range of moral rights granted to the author of the work, which always are retained for him, because the author's moral rights are inalienable and non-transferable, and a wide range of economic or exploitation rights, that are granted, at first instance, to the author of the work, but that can be transferred by the author to someone else. The most usual situation is to transfer those economic rights or a part of them to a publisher, through a publishing contract; In that case, a publisher acquires rights to exploit the work in exchange for remuneration to the author by the exercise of those exploitation rights.

Similarly, the laws that rule these intellectual property rights are affected for diverse limits. Regarding to these limits, we find, among many others, the exception of use of a piece of protected copyright works when such use has an educational or scientific purpose.

But any use of a fragment is not allowed with this purpose, and it may cause problems to the professors who use the protected material, and to the educational institution itself, that may be vicariously liable for the damage caused to the author or whoever holds the economic rights of the work. To avoid this problem, we aim to determine the criteria that can serve to prepare guidelines for the professors in order to make a proper exercise of their right to quote or use a fragment of a protected work according with laws.

These guidelines should clarify where are the limits of the use of a piece of a protected work, according to the type of protection required in each case, depending of the exact legal situation of the work (whether or not it is in the public domain for having fulfilled the term of copyright in economic rights; or if there are some special license regarding it, as Creative Commons licenses or Coloriuris, or collective licensing,

This work intend to make an initial treatment of different protection possibilities depending on the applicable license, and to analyze the scope of protection of copyright in each of these cases, as a first step that could serve to prepare such guidelines.

Keywords:

Intellectual Property Rights, Quote, Protected Work, License, Educational Purpose.