Librarians and Fair Use: Take the Big Picture

Can a library put a professor’s reading list of book chapters and other excerpts from academic monographs on e-reserve for students in the class, without permission from the copyright holder?

That’s been in dispute since 2008, when publishers sued Georgia State University for doing just that. A District Court judge ruled that almost all of the scores of uses were fair, but also set an arbitrary standard of 10% for allowable quoting from academic monographs.

And the publishers appealed. Now an appeals court has reviewed the ruling, and sent it back for corrections. Read more...