Category Archives: copyright

How Our Digital Lives Have Made Us All Criminals

By IRIS Posted on by

Cory Doctorow writes about copyright in the digital world:

Copyright law is hard. It used to only govern relations between giant industrial players. Copyright didn’t regulate reading an interesting tidbit from the newspaper for a friend. It didn’t regulate watching movies. But now, sharing a newspaper article with a friend (by blogging it) involves copying, and so triggers copyright. Now watching a movie (by downloading it) involves copying, so it triggers copyright. The rules that are supposed to be interpreted by lawyers at Fortune 100 companies now apply to every single kid working on a project for her class’s website.

This is like having to file with the SEC every time you loan a buddy $5 for lunch.

The rest of the post is interesting too. Apparently the MPAA is finding it hard to believe in the sanctity of other people’s intellectual property even though it has strictly enforced the sanctity of it’s own. (Found via Copy This Blog)

Know Your Copyrights: a New Guide for Faculty and Teaching Assitants from ARL

By IRIS Posted on by

ARL has just released a brochure called “Know Your Copyrights” (PDF) which it says “gives faculty and teaching assistants in higher education an easy-to-scan explanation of when and how they can legally use intellectual property in their teaching, often without requesting permission or paying fees.”

I just gave it a quick read and I’m impressed. It covers educational use very well, and even touches on how to manage the rights of the things you produce, and all with a healthy library influence. There’s also a handy quick-reference chart near the end that is one of the best I’ve seen. My only gripe is that it occasionally commingles the law with non-legal guidelines without calling attention to which are which.

On the plus side, it’s released under a Creative Commons license which specifies that derivative works are fine as long as they include attribution and aren’t commercial.

You’re either able to pay for the beautifully printed copies or… you can download a PDF for free.

[Update: Just to clarify, the guidelines I mentioned aren't "illegal," they just aren't law. For example, when the guide says that copying a timely article when you've just found it and don't have time to seek permission is generally accepted as fair use, this directly references the "spontaneity" section of the Classroom Guidelines, which were never adopted as law but are nevertheless widely accepted by publishers. Nothing in the legal code says anything about time crunches.]

Licenses, e-Access… Are They Diminishing Information Distribution?

By IRIS Posted on by

Just before the new year, I was talking to one of the people on our copyright committee and he brought up a very interesting question. Is it possible that we will run into an information shortage as we move toward more and more e-access for everything from music to journal articles to books? Here is his reasoning.

First there’s the problem of disappearing fair use. E-access comes with license agreements which trump fair use, and it immediately flips the switch from copyright/fair use to DMCA, which radically reduces user rights. So what happens if a larger and larger portion of our collections are ebooks, ejournals, emusic, etc.? Will our faculty be able to employ these works in their instruction to the same extent? This is largely dependent on the licenses we sign, so as more and more of our collection is electronic we will have to be more and more careful what rights we sign away.

Secondly, what happens if the major, larger, richer libraries stop receiving print versions of books and journals and instead subscribe to e-access for those things? And what if their license agreements restrict those libraries’ abilities to lend via interlibrary loan? The smaller libraries that have benefited from interlibrary loan arrangements may not have access at all any more.

I’d never thought of this before. I love e-access to information, and it would be hard to serve our students without it (and we don’t even have a traditional distance education program, so I can’t imagine what a boon e-access is for those libraries). But I think we’ll have to be careful when balancing growing collections with static amounts of available space, or when we’re eager to give 24/7 access to patrons near and far. If we aren’t careful we may end up like stranded sailors dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean of water. We may end up having access to only our own subscription resources while wading through a flood of information flowing all around us, but denied to us.

It’s a thought to give me pause, and it reinforces that while libraries “aren’t just about books any more” we still need to be about books. It also reinforces that laws and license agreements need to change to the point that we can make use of e-versions of information in the same way that we can make use of analog versions.

eReserves: Blessing or Curse?

By IRIS Posted on by

Blessing. Definitely a blessing to our users and database vendors, but a blessing with a curse-ish aftertaste.

Everyone is familiar with the blessing part. Users get 24/7 access to their course readings, and database vendors get a more accurate picture of the amount of usage they’re getting for their license fees. (Without eReserves we’d have to print out a copy of an article and put it on paper reserve, where it would be read by a class of students, photocopied by most of them, etc. But there’d only be one hit on the vendor’s server.)

But on our campus eReserves is an easy target for all sorts of campus ills. For example, it’s common knowledge around campus that eReserves is the cause of our horrible printing problem, with reams and reams of paper filing through our printers every day. And I’m sure that classes that depend more and more on journal readings and less on text-book compilations do make for more use of eReserves and more printing. But what nobody seems to realize is that all the requests for electronic access to journals means that more and more of our journal collection is e-only. And even if we have electronic access and print access, guess which one will be used most often? And what do people do with journal articles they find online? They print them to mark up over lunch or a midnight snack.

Not only that, but there’s more and more good, authoritative, quality research available on the free web, and you can bet that students print these pages by the ream. This is especially true because printing is free on our campus, so everything from email to research to homework spills from the two printers in the reference area at the rate of 7.06 pages every minute the library is open. (The the two reference area printers account for more printing than every other printer on campus… combined.)

I’ve also seen more and more students lately who prefer to scan print journal articles slowly, page by page, and then convert the images into PDFs all so that they could print (for free) rather than photocopy (for a fee). In related news, the use of photocopiers in the library has dropped so much in recent years that our printing department is considering removing a few of the copiers from the library entirely.

So the upshot is that printing is a definite problem, but the answer isn’t as simple as, “Well, with the advent of eReserves printing went through the roof….” The information universe is changing, not just one section of it. All of it. eReserves, journal subscription, database licensing, online publishing, assignments and pedagogical approaches to information, everything.

Oh, and eReserves is also not a devious plot to keep professors from ordering text books or paying copyright fees or anything else like that. Moodle can do all that so much more easily. ;)

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