More on electronic reserves -Reply -Reply -Reply

[Claire Dougherty]

Re: Karen Schneider's comments Wed, 11 Sep 1996 08:05:14

I would think a good portion of the weight of your argument rests on what
you would define as 'systematic', and also whether you're referring to
systematic copying of entire books/journals or of portions of them; single
chapters, single articles, etc.  My understanding of the fair use clause is
that care has been taken to distinguish between systematic and one time (or
'spontaneous', whatever that translates to in legal terms) use of
copyrighted materials.

>I distinguish between the right of the public to have
>access to information and the right of a college professor to use
>systematic copying (or scanning, or whatever) to provide free
>resources for students that  deny my publisher the payments for
>books that ultimately turn into royalty checks for me.

If a professor pays a fee to CCC to gain rights to photocopy your article
for a course packet, does your publisher send you a royalty check?  What
about when they pay for permission to copy two chapters from your book? My
experience with CCC, at least, has been that in most cases they only
require the user to provide information about the year the journal was
published, not the author of the article, not the title, not even the
particular issue from which it was extracted.  It seems to me that you're
confusing the gross violators (those who would copy an entire work without
attempting to seek permission or pay fees) with those who exercize fair use
to copy small portions once without requesting permission and/or request
permission/pay fees to reproduce larger portions.

___________________________________________
M. Claire Dougherty
Reserve/Multimedia Services Librarian
Northwestern University Library
(847) 467-1437
m-dougherty at nwu.edu
http://www.library.nwu.edu/staff/cdougherty