We often think that we have a right to use any content in our courses, since we are using it in for educational purposes. However, the actual copyright law is not so generous, and college policy and the faculty contract clearly indicate that it's the instructor who is responsible for ensuring that class materials meet the law. In short:

If you didn't write it, you probably don't own it.
If you don't own it, you need to consider copyright law.

The college library has a very good copyright resource which can give you more background and help.

Educational Purposes?

The idea that content can be freely used for educational purposes originates from the Fair Use doctrine, a part of copyright law. Unfortunately, purpose is only one of four factors that govern this limit on copyright law. The four factors are:

The purpose of the use (e.g. for-profit, educational).
The nature of the copyrighted work (e.g. non-fiction, creative)
The proportion (and importance) of the work used.
The impact on the market for that work.

The library tutorial helps explain Fair Use in more detail. There are a few additional resources that can help you determine whether your use qualifies:

The Fair Use Evaluator weighs the four factors of Fair Use based on your answers to a series of questions
The Exceptions for Instructors eTool is a similar, simpler calculator of whether your use will be legal.

Solutions

Get Clearance

The first solution to this issue is to get clearance from the copyright holder. Sometimes, this is simply a matter of emailing the owner. For instance, if you want to post Chapter 1 of your textbook so that students have a few more weeks to buy the book, email the textbook rep. If your book comes with DVD videos, and you want to stream those online in your class, do the same.

Often it's not so simple: the publisher will want compensation, or (as we find with videos) the publisher is no longer in business, so there's no obvious contact information. Contact the Reference Librarians or Educational Technology for help.

Link, Don't Copy

One effective way to avoid copyright issues is to link to materials instead of copying them. For instance, you can link to the extensive digital collections in the Highline Library, which include everything from refereed and popular journals to movies on a broad range of subjects. More detail is available in the "Assembling Content" module, in the Linking to Articles from Library Databases guide, or by contacting the Reference Librarians at the Highline Library.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

OER are resources made available in various formats that are licensed to allow free (or very low cost) educational use. The material is still copyrighted, but the author has granted a license for others to use the work in a certain way. Most of the time, these licenses work very well for classroom use.

For instance, a typical OER license might read CC-BY-NC-SA, which means that the work is licensed by Creative Commons such that a person can use it as long as they: provide attribution (BY), use if for non-commercial (NC) purposes, and share any modifications they make (SA, or Share-alike).

There are numerous resources online, including:

The WA State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) offers a short online class on how to use OER in classes, and you can contact the Reference Librarians for help finding resources online.