Citing correctly in teaching: Citation rights explained in an understandable wayMusic in musical works

The right to quote under Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) also opens up many pos­si­bil­i­ties for use in uni­ver­sity teaching—provided that the mate­r­ial is actu­ally quoted and not merely “reused.” The deci­sive fac­tors are a clear pur­pose for the quo­ta­tion, a scope appro­pri­ate to the pur­pose, a com­plete source ref­er­ence, and a vis­i­ble sep­a­ra­tion between one’s own work and bor­rowed works, espe­cially if the mate­ri­als are later pub­lished under CC licenses as Open Edu­ca­tional Resources (OER). In the blog post Quot­ing indi­vid­ual for­mats – what to con­sider for texts, images, and AI, we pro­vide a few exam­ples of how to quote indi­vid­ual types of works cor­rectly.

Core principles of the right to quote (Section 51 UrhG)

Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) per­mits the use of pub­lished third-party works for the pur­pose of quo­ta­tion if cer­tain con­di­tions are met:

Own work

The quo­ta­tion must be embed­ded in your own work (e.g., lec­ture slides, lec­ture notes, aca­d­e­mic text, edu­ca­tional video, etc.). A work does not con­sti­tute an “orig­i­nal work” in the copy­right sense if its design is so sim­ple or stan­dard­ized that no per­sonal intel­lec­tual cre­ation is rec­og­niz­able. Some typ­i­cal exam­ples include purely func­tional texts, very sim­ple prod­uct or course descrip­tions, stan­dard oper­at­ing instruc­tions, form texts, every­day emails with­out indi­vid­ual design, sim­ple tables, or sim­ple overview lists.

Purpose of quotation

The pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion requires a rec­og­niz­able inter­nal con­nec­tion between the exter­nal work and your own pre­sen­ta­tion. The quoted work must serve as evi­dence, exam­ple, or sub­ject of a sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion (e.g., analy­sis, crit­i­cism, com­par­i­son, inter­pre­ta­tion).

A per­mis­si­ble quo­ta­tion does not exist if third-party con­tent is used merely for dec­o­ra­tive pur­poses or as filler, such as a the­mat­i­cally appro­pri­ate image with­out fur­ther dis­cus­sion or the inser­tion of back­ground music with­out analysis—this is mere use, not evi­dence.

The dis­cus­sion must be vis­i­ble in the original/newly cre­ated medium itself: it is not suf­fi­cient for a work to be com­mented on only in an oral pre­sen­ta­tion, while the slides pub­lished later show the quo­ta­tion but do not con­tain any writ­ten analy­sis or clas­si­fi­ca­tion of their own. In this case, a per­mis­si­ble quo­ta­tion is only present in the oral dis­cus­sion of the quoted work dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion, but not in the lec­ture slides pub­lished later, in which no pur­pose for the quo­ta­tion is appar­ent.

Fur­ther­more, tasks relat­ing to exter­nal works (“Describe the image,” “Ana­lyze the text excerpt”) are not cov­ered by the pur­pose of quo­ta­tion because they “work with the work” didac­ti­cally with­out being a work in their own right that eval­u­ates or dis­cusses the con­tent of the exter­nal work—the stu­dents are sup­posed to ana­lyze that first.

Principle of economy

The prin­ci­ple of econ­omy means that only that part of a third-party work may be repro­duced which is truly nec­es­sary for the spe­cific pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion. In prac­tice, this means that, as a rule, excerpts—such as indi­vid­ual pas­sages from a text, short sequences from a film, or lim­ited image excerpts—are suf­fi­cient, as long as they can be used to com­pre­hen­si­bly sub­stan­ti­ate one’s own argu­men­ta­tion, analy­sis, or crit­i­cism. The com­plete repro­duc­tion of an entire work is only per­mis­si­ble in very lim­ited excep­tional cases, in par­tic­u­lar in the con­text of exten­sive sci­en­tific quo­ta­tions pur­suant to Sec­tion 51 sen­tence 2 no. 1 UrhG. A large quo­ta­tion can only be con­sid­ered if the entire work itself is the sub­ject of an in-depth sci­en­tific dis­cus­sion and the com­plete repro­duc­tion is nec­es­sary for this analy­sis – for exam­ple, when dis­cussing a sin­gle poem, a car­i­ca­ture, or a short video that is inter­preted in detail. In all other cases, the quo­ta­tion must be lim­ited to what is “nec­es­sary” and must not become a free sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal work.

Source reference

Accord­ing to Sec­tion 63 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG), every quo­ta­tion must be accom­pa­nied by a clear and com­plete source ref­er­ence; what con­sti­tutes “com­plete” depends on the type of work. The aim is always to clearly iden­tify the author and to spec­ify the source so pre­cisely that the work can be found with­out dif­fi­culty.

Gen­eral min­i­mum require­ments:

• Name of the author (usu­ally first and last name)

• Title of the work

• Spe­cific reference/source (e.g., book page, edi­tion, URL).

The processing prohibition applies in principle.

When quot­ing, there is a gen­eral pro­hi­bi­tion on edit­ingSec­tion 62(1) of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) The quoted work may not be altered in gen­eral. Any dis­tor­tion that impairs the moral inter­ests of the author is pro­hib­ited under Sec­tion 14 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG). At the same time, the right to quote allows cer­tain inter­ven­tions that are jus­ti­fied by the pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion.
“Tech­ni­cal” or func­tional adjust­ments are unprob­lem­atic if they serve the pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion and do not dis­tort its mean­ing:

• Abbre­vi­a­tions with ellip­sis marks, if it is clearly rec­og­niz­able that the text has been abbre­vi­ated and the mean­ing is not dis­torted.

• Empha­sis (bold type, under­lin­ing, high­light­ing, cir­cling – also with H5P), if indi­cated, e.g., “Empha­sis added by the author.”

• Change in the form of quo­ta­tion, e.g., from a direct quo­ta­tion in the run­ning text to a block quo­ta­tion or from direct speech to indi­rect speech, as long as the con­tent and mean­ing are not dis­torted.

• tech­nis­che Anpas­sun­gen beim Medi­en­wech­sel etwa ein Foto eines Gemäldes im Rah­men eines Bildz­i­tats oder die ger­ingfügige Verkleinerung eines Bildes zur Ein­bindung in ein Lay­out
  

How­ever, pro­cess­ing that goes beyond the above-men­tioned pur­pose-related adjust­ments is not per­mit­ted:

• Mean­ing-alter­ing “rephras­ing” of a quote that attrib­utes state­ments to the author that were not actu­ally made

• Col­lages, mon­tages, or sig­nif­i­cant graphic alter­ations of an image, if the orig­i­nal is still rec­og­niz­able and is thereby rein­ter­preted in terms of con­tent or depicted in a degrad­ing man­ner (in which case the alter­ation requires con­sent)

• stilis­tis­che Über­ar­beitung eines Tex­tauss­chnitts, sodass nicht mehr klar ist, was Orig­i­nal und was Kom­men­tar ist

Free use or editing? The decisive factor is the recognizability of the original.

If the exter­nal work serves only as inspi­ra­tion and the result is an inde­pen­dent work that clearly dif­fers from the orig­i­nal (i.e., the orig­i­nal is no longer rec­og­niz­able in the new work), this is referred to as free use (Sec­tion 23 UrhG); in this case, the right to quote no longer applies, but rather a sep­a­rate copy­right to the new work.

As long as the orig­i­nal work is still clearly rec­og­niz­able, it is treated as an adap­ta­tion or trans­for­ma­tion under copy­right law; its pub­li­ca­tion is not per­mit­ted with­out con­sent, unless an excep­tion (e.g., right to quote, parody/pastiche) applies.

Conclusion

The right to quote under Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) is a pow­er­ful but delib­er­ately nar­rowly defined tool for uni­ver­sity teach­ing: it allows pro­tected texts, images, music, and films to be used with­out hav­ing to obtain a license for each piece of content—but only if they are actu­ally quoted and not sim­ply “reused.” It there­fore remains cru­cial that the pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion is clearly rec­og­niz­able, that the scope is cho­sen spar­ingly, that sources are fully cited, and that the author’s own work clearly out­weighs the quoted mate­r­ial.

It is also impor­tant that the source ref­er­ence is clearly placed—for exam­ple, directly on the image/video, in a cap­tion, or in an eas­ily iden­ti­fi­able list of sources—so that the author and source are read­ily iden­ti­fi­able.

With OER, it is also impor­tant to visu­ally dis­tin­guish the quo­ta­tion from the rest of the text and to explic­itly exclude quo­ta­tions from the CC license in the license notice, as Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) only per­mits use within the scope of the quo­ta­tion, but not co-licens­ing of the quoted work. With­out this notice, the impres­sion could be cre­ated that the quoted work itself is sub­ject to the selected CC license.

Exam­ple:
XY is licensed under CC-BY, unless oth­er­wise indi­cated / sec­tions / graph­ics, etc. that are marked dif­fer­ently are excluded.

Ulti­mately, this means the fol­low­ing for OER: quo­ta­tions are wel­come, but they remain legally third-party mate­r­ial that is used under Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) and must there­fore be expressly excluded from the CC license in the license notice. Those who observe these divid­ing lines can work with third-party works in a legally com­pli­ant manner—in courses, in sci­en­tific (open access) pub­li­ca­tions, and when pub­lish­ing open edu­ca­tional resources (OER).

More infor­ma­tion is avail­able in our Help Cen­ter. In addi­tion, the twillo team is avail­able by email or every Thurs­day dur­ing twillo-Thurs­day to answer any ques­tions you may have about copy­right, AI, and OER.