Copyright

[John McKay]

I agree with Thomas's point that librarians shouldn't
play copyright police officer! The way the UK 
copyright law works, however, is that libraries have
been assumed to have responsibility for breaches of
copyright UNLESS they have taken "reasonable"
steps to prevent it. My experience of student users
is that they assume the internet is in some sense
"free" and not subject to the constraints of paper
based publication. We don't "forbid" our users to
download material: we do ask them to be as aware 
of the intellectual property rights of others as they
would wish others to be of theirs!

>>
>>One of our commonest requests from users is to
>>copy *images* from within web pages. We make the
>>usual point to users about copyright!
>
>And what point is that, exactly?  Format alone does not determine whether  
>making a copy is fair use.  I'd be very ticked off if a library that  
>allowed me to download a few thousand bibliographic citations (perhaps  
>even in a format I could import into another database) automatically told  
>me I couldn't snare a copy of some 3k inline GIF.
>
>It's good to make users aware of copyright issues.  It's potentially  
>dangerous to play copyright cop.
>
>
--
John McKay
Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication
Walden Road, Chislehurst, Kent BR7 5SN, UK
phone  +44 (0)181-468 7071
fax  +44 (0)181-295 1070