More on electronic reserves -Reply

[Brian Nielsen]

At 03:09 PM 9/6/96 -0700, SCHNEIDER.KAREN at epamail.epa.gov wrote:
>
>I would be truly horrified if people thought it was ok to
>systematically photocopy entire books or articles I have written
>for entire classes.  Law or no law, that's not fair.  I have a right to
>earn a living by the sweat of my brow.  Any solutions we come up
>with need to take that in account.
>
The Fair Use provision of the 1976 Copyright Act (section 107) is both law,
and, in my view, fair.  The purpose of copyright is to  "promote the
Progress of Science and useful Arts", not explicitly to remunerate authors
or other copyright holders.  The fair use doctrine was written into the 1976
law to recognize that fact.  

Two specific points:
1) Most of the copyrights for journal articles, which are frequently what
faculty want put on reserve, are held by publishers, not authors like you
and I.  When library schools have assigned to their students stuff I've
written, it never has occurred to me to seek any sort of royalty payment,
nor would I want the publishers to ask for it.  If they did, I'd be
rethinking where I sent articles pretty quickly. 

2) The CHANGES in the copyright law now being discussed in Congress threaten
to undermine values that librarianship has historically championed.  This is
a SERIOUS issue for librarians to be concerned about, particularly as it
applies in electronic environments.  As text moves from paper to phosphor,
information is in danger of complete commodification -- if you don't pay for
it, you don't get it.  I would recommend a look into the Digital Future
Coalition website at http://www.ari.net/dfc/ or Paula Samuelson's paper at
http://www.hotwired.com/wired/whitepaper.html .  

Electronic reserve is but one area where issues of fair use will be played
out.  I think that the most basic access libraries have long offered -- the
borrowing of books -- may be endangered by changes in the law when "books"
have only a digital, not material, presence.  Ability to pay should not be
an essential prerequisite for access to our future cultural heritage.  

Brian Nielsen


		Brian Nielsen, Ph.D.
		Manager, Learning Technologies Group
		 Academic Technologies
		Northwestern University
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