Collaborative Academic Library Digital Collections Post- Cambridge University Press, HathiTrust and Google Decisions on Fair Use

Academic libraries face numerous stressors as they seek to meet the needs of their users through technological advances while adhering to copyright laws. This paper seeks to explore one specific proposal to balance these interests, the impact of recent decisions on its viability, and the copyright challenges that remain after these decisions

Shared Collection Development, Digitization, and Owned Digital Collections

While library models already exist for sharing physical materials and joint licensing, this paper envisions an aspect of future collections involving a national digital collection owned, not licensed, by libraries. Collaborative collection development, digitization, and digital object management of owned collections can benefit societies in multiple ways, from expanding access to users otherwise unable to reach these materials, to preserving content even when disaster strikes, to reducing duplication of effort and expense in collection or digitization. This article will explore both the benefits of and the challenges to this type of collaboration

Piece by Piece Review of Digitize-and-Lend Projects Through the Lens of Copyright and Fair Use

Digitize-and-lend library projects can benefit societies in multiple ways, from providing information to people in remote areas, to reducing duplication of effort in digitization, to providing access to people with disabilities. Such projects contemplate not just digitizing library titles for regular patron use, but also allowing the digitized versions to be used for interlibrary loan (ILL), sharing within consortia, and replacing print copies at other libraries. Many of these functions are already supported within the analog world (e.g., ILL), and the digitize-and-lend concept is largely a logical outgrowth of technology, much like the transitioning from manual hand duplication of books to printing presses. The purpose of each function is to facilitate user access to information. Technology can amplify that access, but in doing so, libraries must also be careful not to upset the long established balance in copyright, where authors’ rights sit on the other side of the scale from public benefit. This article seeks to provide a primer on the various components in a digitize-and-lend project, explore the core copyright issues in each, and explain how these projects maintain the balance of copyright even as libraries take advantage of newer technologies

Why Print and Electronic Resources Are Essential to the Academic Law Library

Libraries have supported multiple formats for decades, from paper and microforms to audiovisual tapes and CDs. However, the newest medium, digital transmission, has presented a wider scope of challenges and caused library patrons to question the established and recognized multiformat library. Within the many questions posed, two distinct ones echo repeatedly. The first doubts the need to sustain print in an increasingly digital world, and the second warns of the dangers of relying on a still-developing technology. This article examines both of these positions and concludes that abandoning either format would translate into a failure of service to patrons, both present and future

Building a Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution in Libraries

Law libraries are losing ground in the effort to preserve information in the digital age. In part, this is due declining budgets, user needs, and a caution born from the great responsibility libraries feel to ensure future access instead of selecting a form that may not survive. That caution, though, has caused others, such as Google, to fill the silence with their vision. Libraries must stand and contribute actively to the creation of digital collections if we expect a voice in future discussion. This article presents a vision of the start of a collaborative, digital academic law library, one that will harness our collective strengths while still allowing individual collections to prosper. It seeks to identify and answer the thorniest issues - including copyright - surrounding digitization projects. It does not presume to solve all of these issues. It is, however, intended to be a call for collective action, to stop discussing the law library of the future and to start building it

Brief of Amici Curiae 116 Law Librarians and 5 Law Library Organizations in Support of Respondent, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., No. 18-1150 (U.S. Oct. 16, 2019)

Due process and the rule of law require that the public has meaningful access to “the law.” Every major modern society since the Greeks has recognized the importance of this principle. Roscoe Pound, Theories of the Law, 22 Yale L.J. 114, 117 (1912). In the United States, “the law” largely comes from appellate courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies who have been granted rule-making authority. As every first year law student learns, those law-making bodies have developed highly specific methods for communicating their pronouncements of law through official publications, such as the Official Code of Georgia Annotated (“OCGA”). Those specific methods and their resulting official publications serve a number of important functions that are intrinsic to the underlying purpose of supporting democracy and of fair notice of the law. Official publications of the law assure the reader of the reliability and currency of the text, as well as its acceptance for use in other parts of the legal system, such as for citation before a court. Access to official publications is also critical for conducting and supporting legal scholarship, teaching legal research, preserving state legal materials, and providing equal and equitable access to legal information. A critical feature that enables those uses is that the government has identified the publication as holding special weight as an official, authoritative source. The major point of this brief is that when a state gives official status to a publication containing binding legal pronouncements, the contents of the whole of that publication must be freely and fully accessible by the public. Assertion of copyright over even portions of the publication effectively renders access and use of the core statutory text meaningless. In addition to the logistical difficulties of disentangling binding edicts of law from ancillary materials published with it, if the publication must be disassembled into its component parts for reuse-annotations protected and filtered out, while the statutory text may be copied - the remaining pieces are no longer the “official” publication and unusable for their intended purpose. A state should not be allowed to assert the broad and powerful coercive rights granted by copyright over an official publication of law by interweaving clearly uncopyrightable edicts of law with otherwise copyrightable ancillary materials, such as annotations. Granting copyright protection over even portions of the OCGA would harm law librarians and by extension the public, while granting a windfall to publishers and states who should need no copyright incentive to fulfill their constitutional obligation to publish official copies of their laws. Accordingly, this Court should affirm the decision of the 11th Circuit

\u3ci\u3eHachette\u3c/i\u3e, Controlled Digital Lending, and the Consequences of Divorcing Law From Context

This article will look at the recent Hachette decision against the Internet Archive, analyzing how the court’s reliance on past authorities with insufficient context distorted their meanings. It will focus only on the controlled digital lending (CDL) aspect, not discussing the other claims in the suit or exploring the specific implementation of CDL by the Internet Archive (IA). Since CDL programs can vary widely, IA is better situated than others to identify missing context related to the analysis of the unique components of their efforts. And other libraries engaging in CDL should be able to easily see where their programs differ from the judge’s description of IA’s. For that reason, the analysis below only delves into the language that might be used to chill all CDL programs or innovation more generally

Defeating the Economic Theory of Copyright: How the Natural Right to Seek Knowledge is the Only Theory Able to Explain the Entirety of Copyright’s Balance

The practice of copyright was once a perfect balance, reflecting the intent of the Founders to create an environment where new works were constantly made available to the public for consumption and use. The author would create a work, a user would buy a copy and be free to use it. Neither party had any right to interfere with the other’s activities. All of that changed with newer technologies, exposing the flaws both in our laws and the applications of them. Copyright laws, on their face, prohibit many normal uses of copyrighted works by end users, such as making mixed tapes, converting LPs to mp3s, and playing music at a piano recital. But for the better part of two centuries, the end uses of copyrighted works were treated by the public, Congress, and courts as free from copyright’s purview. On the few occasions where a lawsuit was filed and the defendant felt that their use was the type which copyright was not intended to impact, they would assert a claim in equity, judges would make decisions on a case-by-case basis, and in that way, the early body of fair use law developed.Those judge-made principles were eventually codified in 17 U.S.C. §107. Despite the equitable intent of fair use, it is now analyzed primarily as a matter of law and based on economic theory. This conservative take on fair use carried relatively few costs when infringement litigation was primarily between commercial actors and about for-profit uses, but as newer technologies emerged (e.g., photocopier, home recording devices, the web), the attacks have turned to individuals and non-profit entities for non-profit uses that were once considered immune from the copyright owner’s control. The stakes in fair use litigation are therefore higher today than they have been in years past, potentially resulting in real harm to all. Any continued insistence on viewing fair use as a matter of law and economics only increases the jeopardy, as the value of copyright for society has nothing to do with financial interests. The balance of copyright has meaning beyond the laws in which any nation has embodied it, and for that reason, current attempts to exploit copyright in opposition to those principles should be challenged. This paper will put forth the argument that there remains a separate, equitable, common law claim for the use of knowledge that survives despite fair use’s codification in §107

Copyright Reform: Imagining More Balanced Copyright Laws

Earlier chapters of this book provide a history of copyright and libraries in the United States, a review of outdated language in the existing copyright code, and a discussion of actions by both copyright owners and the public to rebalance copyright outside of legislation. This chapter simply imagines what copyright could be if we disregard the known political and legal obstacles. It starts with no constraints, which one might argue is both impractical and foolish. Why spend time discussing what could be when treaties, self-interest, and powerful industry lobbies stand in the way? The answer is simply that environments can be changed. They have been changed throughout history, whether through legislation (e.g., copyright terms), case law (e.g., fair use in relation to technology), or ground roots movements (e.g., the initial movement to recognize authors’ rights). And if one hopes to change history, why not start first by exploring possibilities that we might not consider otherwise? Refusing to consider change out of fear of opposition translates to a voluntary surrender of power. Beginning with restraints also blinds one to possibilities of a much better construct than could be achieved with them. If everything has to fit in a box, people will often discard anything they think won’t fit at the outset. Only by removing the box can we imagine the full range of benefits of a given course of action. If the outcome is desired, then efforts can turn to whether or not there is a way to fit the outcome into the box. Or to decide if the benefits are so great that destruction of the box is in society’s best interest. A vision should start with where one thinks the world should be, and then reality can help to shape the path. Because this is the last chapter in the book, to fully understand how the guiding interests were chosen, one would need to read the preceding chapters

Socio-demographic, Clinical, and Genetic Determinants of Quality of Life in Lung Cancer Patients.

Patient reported health-related quality of life (QOL) is a major component of the overall well-being of cancer patients, with links to prognosis. In 6,420 lung cancer patients, we identified patient characteristics and genetic determinants of QOL. Patient responses from the SF-12 questionnaire was used to calculate normalized Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component Summary (MCS) scores. Further, we analyzed 218 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the p38 MAPK signaling pathway, a key mediator of response to cellular and environmental stress, as genetic determinants of QOL in a subset of the study population (N = 641). Trends among demographic factors for mean PCS and MCS included smoking status (PCS Ptrend < 0.001, MCS Ptrend < 0.001) and education (PCS Ptrend < 0.001, MCS Ptrend < 0.001). Similar relationships were seen for MCS. The homozygous rare genotype of MEF2B: rs2040562 showed an increased risk of a poor MCS (OR: 3.06, 95% CI: 1.05-8.92, P = 0.041). Finally, survival analysis showed that a low PCS or a MCS was associated with increased risks of five-year mortality (HR = 1.63, 95% CI: 1.51-1.77, HR = 1.23, 95% CI: 1.16-1.32, respectively) and there was a significant reduction in median survival time (Plog-rank < 0.001). These findings suggest that multiple factors contribute to QOL in lung cancer patients, and baseline QOL can impact survival