Fair Use Challenges in Academic and Research Libraries

Summarizes findings from a survey of librarians on the application of fair use in copyright practice to fulfill libraries' missions of teaching and learning support, scholarship support preservation, exhibition, and public outreach

RLI 285: Research Library Issues: A Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC 2015 -- Special Issue on Copyright

In “Fair Use Rising: Full-Text Access and Repurposing in Recent Case Law,” Brandon Butler, practitioner-in-residence at the American University Washington College of Law, reviews six recent fair use decisions that cut across many socially important and beneficial purposes. He highlights the trend of courts finding in favor of allowing “the broad redistribution of unaltered, full-text documents for new purposes.” Butler explains how this trend presents new opportunities for research libraries to use and re-purpose the full text of copyrighted works in their collections. Exploring the implications of one critically important case for research libraries, Jonathan Band, legal counsel to the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), reviews key aspects of the decision in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust. Band notes, “The decision has implications for libraries that go far beyond the specific facts of the case. This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on what these implications may be.” Band reviews several issues including mass digitization and storage, access to works, suggestions concerning other forms of access, and associational standing. With the recent settlement of the HathiTrust case and the rulings by the district and appeals courts, libraries may now, with strong confidence, engage in mass digitization, provide access to digitized texts for the print-disabled, and more. Finally, Krista Cox, director of public policy initiatives for ARL, reviews a range of international activity relating to copyright and what all of these activities mean for research libraries in “International Copyright Developments.” These developments range from work at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on the Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired, or Print Disabled, to WIPO discussions of exceptions and limitations for libraries and education, as well as international trade agreement negotiations that have been underway for quite some time. All of these international activities have long-term implications for how research libraries and higher education may engage in research, teaching, and learning

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources: A Guide for Authors, Adapters & Adopters of Openly Licensed Teaching and Learning Materials

This code of best practices includes descriptions, hard cases, principles, and considerations for fair uses of materials in open educational resources with respect to United States copyright law, and with some discussion of copyright outside the United States context. Open Educational Resources and Fair Use Educators, librarians, and institutions have invested in the creation of openly licensed, freely distributed open educational resources (OER) to advance a wide range of goals within the educational system. Open educational resources enable flexible and open pedagogy; increase access to authorship and facilitate representation of different student experiences; and increase equity by reducing the barriers of cost in accessing high-quality learning materials. OER exist for all levels of education, from primary to postsecondary, and across disciplines. Creators and users of OER are often motivated by a shared commitment to increase access to materials and to contribute to the common good. However, to meet the full pedagogical, pragmatic, and social functions of those teaching and learning materials, educators must have the ability to incorporate and reference existing copyrighted content, both historical and contemporary. Uncertainty about the copyright rules that govern these incorporations can warp both what subjects are covered in open educational resources and how those subjects are taught. Fortunately, such uncertainty is not inevitable, and OER makers already have the professional skills and pedagogical judgement they need to make good copyright choices. Indeed, good pedagogy is good fair use practice – a careful understanding of the specific pedagogical purpose of an insert is the foundation of the legal determination that it is fair use. The fair use doctrine in United States copyright law enables incorporation of a wide range of copyrighted inserts into OER for common teaching and learning purposes. This Code follows on the experience and expertise with community-authored codes of best practices for groups such as documentary filmmakers, art educators, media literacy teachers, and academic and research librarians, which have provided those practitioners with clear, well-documented, and reliable ways to evaluate fair use. Signaling Fair Use The OER community is characterized by its commitment to assuring that adoption and adaptation of OER should be as straightforward and transparent as possible. As a result, members of that community emphasized that when inserts in materials are included in reliance on fair use, a clear acknowledgement of this fact would be a “best practice.” This will enable subsequent adopters and adapters in similar pedagogical settings to understand and extend the original authors’ fair use choices. For example, the fair use rationale for using an illustration from a famous experiment doesn’t change when a high-school teacher simplifies an open college-level text about cell biology to a grade-appropriate level. In the shared enterprise of creating, using, and adapting OER, although fair use is a right of individuals, the values of the OER community create a rich environment to communicate the doctrine’s potential for increasing the type and quality of teaching and learning materials

Advocacy and public policy update - July 2016

This resource provides an update of key advocacy and policy issues of interest to the research library community in Canada and in the US from April 1 through July 14, 2016. Topics covered include copyright and IP, open and public access policies, net neutrality and privacy