Back in May I posted a link about the Orphan Works Bill taken up by Congress. Though it would not have provided a sorely needed recodification of the rather burdensome and vague US Copyright Code, it would have provided some measure of protection to those who desire to advance the field of knowledge by building upon the work of an author who has been either unresponsive to a researcher’s attempts at securing copyright permissions or whose location and contact information are unknown. This protection would have come in the form of limiting judicial remedies in cases where an author or other copyright owner who had been unresponsive to a diligent, good-faith effort on the part of a researcher subsequently sued.

Anyway, the Senate passed the bill but it has since died a quiet death in the House. I agree (I think) with Lawrence Lessig’s NTY argument that what constitutes a “good-faith effort” may have been too vague in this bill, but I hate to throw out the orphan with the bathwater. Lessig points out the problem:

The Congressional Research Service has estimated that just 2 percent of copyrighted works that are 55 to 75 years old retain any commercial value. Yet the system maintains no registry of copyright owners nor of entities from which permission to use a copyrighted work can be sought. The consequence has been that an extraordinary chunk of culture gets mired in unnecessary copyright regulation.

On a related note, I urge all my readers who are Members of Congress (ha!) to consider and act on the recommendations by the Section 108 Study Group sponsored by the Library of Congress.

There. I feel better getting that off my chest.

Oh, and the fastest way to kill a blog and lose readers? Begin blogging about copyright law.

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Research, copyright | 2 Comments »

An article in today’s New York Times (online) by Katie Hafner summarizes a lawsuit brought by three academic publishers against Georgia State University’s appropriation of their content for digital course reading packets. It states, in part:

In a complaint filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Atlanta, the publishers — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications — sued four university officials, asserting “systematic, widespread and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works” by Georgia State, which the university distributes through its Web site.

…Indeed, as the printed word is put in digital form, holding onto rights seems to many like climbing up the slippery sides of a glass. The case centers on so-called course packs, compilations of reading materials from various books and journals. The lawsuit contends that in many cases, professors are providing students with multiple chapters of a given work, in violation of the “fair use” provision of copyright law. The publishers are seeking an order that the defendants secure permissions and pay licensing fees to the copyright owners.

Our own library is preparing to launch an institutional repository where digital content will be kept and made available to students/faculty/public depending on the nature of the work and its copyright status. This the very reason why I will be attending a conference on copyright management and libraries later this month at Ball State University up in Indiana. It appears to be a helpful conference, but theme is almost too corny even to mention. Librarians can really be a ridiculous bunch, but we appear to be among the few who are pushing the use of bleeding-edge technological advances for the legal dissemination of information. And yet Georgia State gets sued. Another half-dozen or so libraries have revised their policies for copyright management (which were likely fairly detailed already) in response to publishers’ concerns in the last year.

When will publishers learn that the availability and accessibility of information is directly tied to its usage? When was the last time you bought a music CD without listening to part of it online or at Barnes and Noble first? Similarly, in my humble and often incorrect opinion, the NIV translation of the Bible outsold the NASB translation because the NASB people were more restrictive in their licensing rights for use in publications, programs, curricula, etc… Again, accessibility is directly tied to usage in today’s world.

Admittedly, I do not know the details of this lawsuit. Nor am I acquainted with the copyright policies of Georgia State’s libraries. I do, however, plan on keeping an eye on this lawsuit. It is likely not as clear-cut as the NYT story reports it, nor is it as clear-cut as commercial copyright violations. Copyright law and its application to academic libraries is increasingly murky. And I have been tasked with our own library’s copyright clearance for reserves, e-reserves, and potentially for helping to navigate this issue with our forthcoming digital repository. I just finished revising our copyright policies last year and now I feel like I should do it again because the application of the law keeps changing. If we as librarians cannot keep up with it, how can we expect faculty to understand? Copyright conference, here I come.

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Libraries, copyright | No Comments »