In this final installment of the copyright roundup I have been doing this week, I want to note some remarkable developments in the copyright law of the United Kingdom, where a hugely significant revision of the statute received final approval this month and will be given royal assent, the last stage of becoming law, in June.
Readers may recall that the UK undertook a study of how to reform copyright law in ways that would encourage more innovation and economic competitiveness. The resulting report, called the Hargreaves Report, made a number of recommendations, many of which were focused on creating limitations and exceptions to the exclusive rights in copyright so that the law would work more like it does in the U.S., including the flexibility provided by fair use. The final results of this legislative process do not include an American-like fair use provision, but they do result in a significant expansion of the fair dealing provisions in U.K. law to better accomplish some of the same things fair use has allowed in the U.S.
Fair dealing is found in a couple of provisions of the British law and allows certain specified activities if those activities are done in a “fair” manner, with specified criteria for fairness. Until now the categories have been narrow and few, but Parliament has just expanded them dramatically. A description of this expansion from the Charter Institute of Library and Information Professionals can be found on the CILIP site. A number of activities that are probably permitted by fair use in the U.S. are now also encompassed by fair dealing in Britain, including private copying, copying by libraries in order to provide those copies to individual users, and some significant expansion of the ability to make copies for the purpose of education.
On this last point, I wonder if the two British university presses that are suing a U.S. university over educational copying have noticed that the tide is against them even at home ... Several points about this legislative reform seem especially important to me.
First is the emphasis in several of the new provisions on supporting both research with and preservation of sound recordings and film. This is one of several places where the U.K. may reasonable be said to have just leapfrogged over the United States, since the provisions about non-profit use and preservation of music and film remain a mess in our law.Second, the British are now adopting an exception for text and data mining into their law. This is huge, and reinforces the idea I have expressed before that libraries should be reluctant about agreeing to licensing terms around TDM; the rights are likely already held by users in many cases, so those provisions really would have the effect, despite being promoted as assisting research, of putting constraints (and sometimes added costs) on what scholars can already do. This is probably true in the U.S., where fair use likely gets us further than vendor licenses would, and it has now been made explicit in the U.K ..."