Citing individual formats—what should be considered for texts, images, and AI?

Below are a few exam­ples of how to cite indi­vid­ual types of works that are rel­e­vant to teach­ing prac­tice. Our blog post “Cit­ing cor­rectly in teach­ing: An under­stand­able expla­na­tion of cita­tion rights” also con­tains gen­eral expla­na­tions of cita­tion rights.

Screencasts and Screenshots

Legally, a screen­shot or screen­cast is a repro­duc­tion of third-party con­tent (web­site, soft­ware inter­face, video, social media post, etc.). A per­mis­si­ble quo­ta­tion only exists if

• the recorded pro­gram interface/other media con­tent itself is the sub­ject of the expla­na­tion (e.g., if the con­tent is ana­lyzed, func­tion­al­i­ties are dis­cussed in detail, menus or oper­at­ing logic are com­pared or dis­cussed in detail, etc.),

• the screenshot/screencast directly aids under­stand­ing of one’s own expla­na­tions (inter­nal con­nec­tion),

• only as much is shown as nec­es­sary, i.e., only excerpts rel­e­vant to the dis­cus­sion,

• the pro­gram and cre­ators of the con­tent are fully cred­ited (source ref­er­ence in the video/material).

Not per­mit­ted as a quo­ta­tion: Screen­casts that show copy­righted films, series, news­pa­per arti­cles, games, pro­grams, or entire web­sites solely to “demon­strate what it looks like” with­out dis­cussing the con­tent.

musical quotations

Music can also be quoted – Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) does not dis­tin­guish between dif­fer­ent types of works; the con­text is what mat­ters.

Music in musical works

In musi­cal works, i.e., com­po­si­tions, arrange­ments, or remixes, the use of musi­cal quo­ta­tions is sub­ject to par­tic­u­larly strict reg­u­la­tions because even short sequences of notes can make a work clearly rec­og­niz­able. Sec­tion 51(3) of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) there­fore expressly per­mits only the quo­ta­tion of “indi­vid­ual pas­sages from a pub­lished musi­cal work” in another musi­cal work—and even then only under strict con­di­tions. Only short, clearly defined excerpts, typ­i­cally short motifs or dis­tinc­tive pas­sages, are per­mit­ted to be embed­ded in a new musi­cal work.

As with a “nor­mal” quo­ta­tion, there must be a pur­pose for the quo­ta­tion: the motif must be used in a mean­ing­ful way in terms of con­tent, for exam­ple as an allu­sion, homage, par­o­dic device, or delib­er­ate styl­is­tic quo­ta­tion. The quoted excerpt must remain rec­og­niz­able as a for­eign ele­ment and must not carry or dom­i­nate the new work. For exam­ple, it would be per­mis­si­ble to quote the open­ing motif of Beethoven’s 5th Sym­phony as a homage to an oth­er­wise inde­pen­dent com­po­si­tion.

Music in teaching and learning materials

Edu­ca­tional resources such as scripts, lec­ture slides, audio com­men­taries, or video lec­tures are gen­er­ally pro­tected by copy­right as lit­er­ary works or hybrid forms com­bin­ing text, images, and sound. The gen­eral require­ments for quo­ta­tions set out in Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) there­fore apply to any music included in such resources.

The fol­low­ing are per­mit­ted in par­tic­u­lar:

• a short record­ing of a piece of music to explain or ana­lyze style, har­mony, lyrics, struc­ture, or pro­duc­tion meth­ods in a tar­geted man­ner;

• The use of audio exam­ples that are com­mented on in direct rela­tion to the topic at hand, for exam­ple, dur­ing a detailed dis­cus­sion of a pop song in a music or media sem­i­nar.

The fol­low­ing, in par­tic­u­lar, are not cov­ered by the right to quote:

• Com­po­si­tions as mere back­ground music in edu­ca­tional videos, with­out any inde­pen­dent exam­i­na­tion of con­tent

• the com­plete repro­duc­tion of a song with­out a com­pre­hen­si­ble pur­pose of quo­ta­tion;

For OER, this means:

• Short musi­cal quo­ta­tions with a rec­og­niz­able pur­pose can be part of open teach­ing mate­ri­als as long as they are rec­og­niz­able as quo­ta­tions.

• OER should not be designed in such a way that a song or sub­stan­tial parts thereof are effec­tively avail­able as freely acces­si­ble audio con­tent, thereby replac­ing reg­u­lar forms of use (stream­ing, pur­chase, licens­ing); in such cases, the lim­its of fair use would be exceeded.

Texts

When quot­ing text, care must be taken to ensure that the scope and weight of the exter­nal text does not become exces­sive: your own work must clearly be in the fore­ground in terms of both con­tent and scope, and the quo­ta­tion may only have a sup­port­ing func­tion. The exter­nal work may there­fore not form the core of your own pre­sen­ta­tion or replace your own thoughts, but may only serve as evi­dence for your own argu­men­ta­tion.

The per­mis­si­ble scope depends on the pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion and must be deter­mined on a case-by-case basis; as a guide­line, text quo­ta­tions should gen­er­ally only com­prise an excerpt and, as a rule, only a frac­tion of the third-party work. Entire lin­guis­tic works (e.g., a com­plete arti­cle or a com­plete poem) may only be quoted in full in excep­tional cases if the con­tent must be dis­cussed in rela­tion to the com­plete text and a shorter pas­sage would not serve the pur­pose of analy­sis or dis­cus­sion (typ­i­cal, for exam­ple, in the case of short poems).

Typ­i­cally required are:

• Author: First and last name

• Title of work (arti­cle or book title)

• In antholo­gies: if applic­a­ble, title of the journal/series or anthol­ogy

• Year of pub­li­ca­tion

• Page number(s) of the cited pas­sage

• For online texts, also include: URL and, if pos­si­ble, (last) date accessed.

Exam­ple:
Müller, Anna (2026): “Title of the essay,” in: Jour­nal X, 12, pp. 45–47.

Pictures and illustrations

Illustrations—such as graph­ics, pho­tos, or dia­grams from spe­cial­ist jour­nals and textbooks—may also be quoted under the con­di­tions set out in Sec­tion 51 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG). Pub­lish­ers may not “pre­vent” such law­ful quo­ta­tions; the right to quote is a manda­tory copy­right restric­tion and can­not be effec­tively excluded by gen­eral terms and con­di­tions or license pro­vi­sions.

An image cita­tion is per­mis­si­ble if the image in ques­tion is itself the sub­ject of the dis­cus­sion, for exam­ple:

• the analy­sis of a dia­gram or sta­tis­tics,

• the inter­pre­ta­tion of a car­toon or illus­tra­tion,

• the art-his­tor­i­cal dis­cus­sion of a paint­ing, pho­to­graph, or poster.

In these cases, the image serves as a nec­es­sary point of ref­er­ence for analy­sis, crit­i­cism, com­par­i­son, or inter­pre­ta­tion; with­out the image cita­tion, the argu­ment itself would be dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to under­stand.

How­ever, the purely dec­o­ra­tive use of images is not cov­ered by the right to quote, for exam­ple:

• any photo on the title slide just because it “looks nicer,”

• an illus­tra­tion to lighten the mood, with­out going into detail

• An image that is only used as a back­ground graphic, for exam­ple.

In such cases, the image is interchangeable—it could be replaced by any other com­pa­ra­ble illus­tra­tion with­out chang­ing the con­tent or mes­sage of the text. In this case, the nec­es­sary inter­nal con­nec­tion between the work and the quo­ta­tion is miss­ing; this is nor­mal use, not a quo­ta­tion.

Images may be quoted in part or in full, pro­vided that the scope is jus­ti­fied by the pur­pose of the quo­ta­tion:

• If an excerpt (e.g., a detail from a map or dia­gram) is suf­fi­cient, only that part should be used.

• If the image can only be mean­ing­fully ana­lyzed as a whole (e.g., a car­i­ca­ture or a work of art whose mes­sage is derived from the over­all com­po­si­tion), a full quo­ta­tion may be per­mis­si­ble.

For image cita­tions, the source ref­er­ence should include:

• Author: First and last name

• Title of the image (or a descrip­tion if no title exists)

• Year of ori­gin (if known)

• Ref­er­ence:

• For repro­duc­tions in books: addi­tion­ally, book title, pub­lisher, year of pub­li­ca­tion, page num­ber.

• For museum works: museum/collection and loca­tion.

• For online images: URL and date accessed.

Exam­ple:
Image: van Gogh, Vin­cent: Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Mod­ern Art, New York.
Photo: Max Exam­ple, “Title of photo,” in: Meier, Sabine: Land­scapes, Berlin: Exam­ple Pub­lish­ing, 2023, p. 12.

Movies and videos

The same basic prin­ci­ples apply to film and video quo­ta­tions as to text or image quo­ta­tions, but they are han­dled par­tic­u­larly restric­tively due to the typ­i­cal length and appeal of audio­vi­sual works.

The use of film excerpts is per­mit­ted if they are specif­i­cally ana­lyzed or com­mented on in terms of con­tent and sub­ject mat­ter, for exam­ple in the con­text of film analy­sis or media crit­i­cism. The excerpt must be nec­es­sary for the respec­tive dis­cus­sion and must be embed­ded in a sep­a­rate work; it may not serve merely as illus­tra­tion or “light relief.”

How­ever, inte­grat­ing entire films or longer videos into OER or pub­licly acces­si­ble teach­ing mate­ri­als is not con­sid­ered quo­ta­tion, but rather reg­u­lar use of the work—this requires usage rights or licenses. The lim­i­ta­tion of quo­ta­tion rights does not legit­imize com­plete repro­duc­tion in this case, as the OER mate­r­ial would oth­er­wise effec­tively become a free sub­sti­tute source for the film.

In excep­tional cases, short films or videos may be quoted in full if the require­ments for exten­sive sci­en­tific quo­ta­tions under Sec­tion 51, sen­tence 2, no. 1 of the Ger­man Copy­right Act (UrhG) are met. This requires that:

• an inde­pen­dent sci­en­tific work (e.g., essay, dis­ser­ta­tion, research report, lec­ture),

• eine ver­tiefte inhaltliche Auseinan­der­set­zung ger­ade mit diesem konkreten Film/Video,

• the need to repro­duce the work in its entirety because the pur­pose of the analy­sis or dis­cus­sion can only be mean­ing­fully achieved on the basis of the entire short film (e.g., in the case of very short videos or com­mer­cials),

• a clear dom­i­nance of one’s own expla­na­tions over mere repro­duc­tion, as well as

• A com­plete cita­tion (direc­tor, title, year, pro­duc­tion com­pany, source/URL, time details).

For film and video quo­ta­tions, the fol­low­ing is rec­om­mended as a min­i­mum:

• Name of the direc­tor (and pro­ducer, if applic­a­ble)

• Title of the film/video

• year of pro­duc­tion

• Pro­duc­tion loca­tion and pro­duc­tion com­pany (or plat­form)

• Exact time stamp of the quoted sequence (e.g., 00:01:10–00:01:25)

• For online videos, also include: URL and date accessed.

Exam­ple:
Zemeckis, Robert (direc­tor): For­rest Gump [film], USA: Para­mount Pic­tures, 1994, 01:02:14–01:02:45.

AI-generated content

It is impor­tant to dis­tin­guish here: The right to quote is a lim­i­ta­tion of copy­right law and requires that the quoted mate­r­ial is pro­tected by copy­right as a work or part of a work.
Accord­ing to cur­rent opin­ion, purely machine-gen­er­ated AI con­tent is gen­er­ally not con­sid­ered to be the “per­sonal intel­lec­tual cre­ation” of a human being and is there­fore often not pro­tected by copy­right (de facto in the pub­lic domain). Such pub­lic domain con­tent may be used, mod­i­fied, and repro­duced to any extent with­out the right to quote; legally, this is not a “quo­ta­tion” but free use.

Nev­er­the­less, the right to quote can play a role in AI mate­r­ial:

• Human-influ­enced AI out­put: If AI is only used as a tool and the result is edited to such an extent that it becomes a “per­sonal intel­lec­tual cre­ation,” the result may again be pro­tected as a work.

• AI out­put con­tains parts of third-party works: AI out­put that rec­og­niz­ably incor­po­rates pas­sages, images, or music from pro­tected works (e.g., almost orig­i­nal song lyrics, strik­ing book pas­sages, typ­i­cal images) is prob­lem­atic.
  These parts remain pro­tected by copy­right; any­one who uses them either needs per­mis­sion or can rely on the right to quote in the case of analy­sis, crit­i­cism, etc.

The clear label­ing of AI out­put is strongly rec­om­mended in prac­tice. Prac­ti­cal tip: In our FAQ, we explain how AI-gen­er­ated con­tent can be marked as such in the meta­data.

Fur­ther 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.