Copying videotapes without the copyright owner’s permission is illegal. An exception is made for libraries to replace a work that is lost or damaged if another copy cannot be obtained at a fair price [Section 108 of the Copyright Act of 1976].  Licenses may be obtained for copying and off-air recording. Absent a formal agreement, “Guidelines for Off-the-Air Recording of Broadcast Programming for Educational Purposes”, an official part of the Copyright Act’s legislative history, applies to most off-air recording [from Virginia M. Helm, supra]:

1. Videotaped recordings may be kept for no more than 45 calendar days after the recording date, at which time the tapes must be erased.
2. Videotaped recordings may be shown to students only within the first 10 school days of the 45-day retention period.
3. Off-air recordings must be made only at the request of an individual instructor for instructional purposes, not by staff in anticipation of later requests.
4. The recordings are to be shown to students no more than two times during the 10-day period, and the second time only for necessary instructional reinforcement.
5. The taped recordings may be viewed after the 10-day period only by instructors for evaluation purposes, that is, to determine whether to include the broadcast program in the curriculum in the future.
6. If several instructors request videotaping of the same program, duplicate copies are permitted to meet the need; all copies are subject to the same restrictions as the original recording.
7. The off-air recordings may not be physically or electronically altered or combined with others to form anthologies, but they need not necessarily be used or shown in their entirety.
8. All copies of off-air recordings must include the copyright notice on the broadcast program as recorded.
9. These guidelines apply only to nonprofit educational institutions, which are further expected to establish appropriate control procedures to maintain the integrity of these guidelines.

Certain public broadcasting services (Public Broadcasting Service, Public Television Library, Great Plains National Instructional Television Library, and Agency for Instructional Television) impose similar restrictions but limit use to only the seven-day period following local broadcast [Virginia M. Helm, supra].