Forecast: Mostly Fair for the Foreseeable Future | Library Babel Fish

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-04-15

Summary:

"Back in 2008 three scholarly publishers – Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage – filed suit against employees of Georgia State University for posting excerpts of books in an e-reserves system without paying for permissions. This was obviously a case closely watched by librarians. When the original decision was handed down, I geeked out over it along with other librarians and lawyers. (It came out on a Friday afternoon. It was 350 pages long. Reader, we Tweeted it.) Essentially, it was fairly good news in that nearly all of the uses were fair – of 99 claims, only 5 were found to be infringing.  The judge had painstakingly analyzed every claim of infringement, applying the four factors used to determine whether a use is fair and reported exactly how she made those decisions. These things are never quick and easy. The publishers appealed. A higher court thought the way the judge applied the four-factor fair use test wasn’t quite right, so they sent it back and she had another go at it, this time putting much more emphasis on the fourth factor, the potential for market harm. Once more, she looked at each claim of infringement very carefully, articulating her analysis for each of the claims of copyright infringement. This time around, 48 cases were analyzed (because for several, it turned out, the publishers lacked clear copyright claims) and the vast majority again were found to be fair uses, even with the changes in how the four factors were weighed. (Hat tip to Kevin Smith for writing up a cogent analysis quickly once again. Andrew Albanese has also covered the story for Publishers Weekly and Brandon Butler has written it up for ARL Policy Notes.)  It probably won’t end here ... There are some ironies, here. Libraries are no longer the gatekeepers they once were for electronic reserves. Most faculty provide students with readings themselves, posting scanned materials in their course management systems, and it will be harder for publishers to chase down malefactors when they’re so widely distributed ..."

Link:

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/forecast-mostly-fair-foreseeable-future

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.fair_use oa.georgia_state.u oa.litigation oa.authors_guild oa.libre

Date tagged:

04/15/2016, 17:11

Date published:

04/15/2016, 13:11