Issue Brief

Does the approach of creating a code of best practices, anchored in professional practice, actually work to expand the utility of fair use? What has happened to others who used codes of best practices to gain access to their rights?

This topic is discussed at length in Aufderheide and Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use (University of Chicago Press, 2011), but some specific examples include:

Does your university offer intellectual property education to incoming students, or have an academic integrity policy that addresses copyright issues? These are important areas where librarians can be of service in offering balanced information about copyright and fair use.

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries suggests at various points that librarians consider the use of appropriate “technical protection measures” when making digitized materials available on-line, as a way of bolstering their fair use claims. Many libraries already employ such measures as a risk-management strategy.

When teachers bring Stacey, a librarian at a Midwestern private university, their course materials to upload on the university’s e-reserves system, she always checks to make sure that the course material has not been uploaded before—or at least, not in the last three years. If it’s fresh material, and it’s only a small fraction of the original work, she’s pretty sure that uploading it for the students to study could be considered a “fair use.” If it has been uploaded before, she tries to license the material, or have the professor find a substitute that the professor hasn’t used before. She knows that at some universities, e-reserves policies are more liberal, but her institution can’t afford a legal challenge, so she likes to err on the conservative side. After all, you can’t be too careful.

The Fifth Principle in the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries is entitled "Reproducing material for use by disabled students, faculty, staff, and other appropriate users." It describes in some detail the circumstances in which making and providing copies of collection materials in formats that are accessible to persons with disabilities constitutes fair use, as well as certain limitations to which that general principle is subject.

The advent of Massive Open Online Courses raises serious legal questions that in turn pose important and fundamental policy challenges for research libraries. As universities rush to find ways to add courses to emerging MOOC platforms, research libraries are being asked to take on new responsibilities (or new versions of old responsibilities) to support this new mode of teaching and learning.

issuebrief-mooc-22oct12.pdf

On Friday, May 11, 2012, Judge Orinda Evans released her 350-page opinion in the copyright infringement lawsuit against Georgia State University. This memo summarizes the key rulings in the case and discusses some possible consequences for libraries generally.

issue-brief-gsu-decision-15may12.pdf

Deliberations over library collections will have no end. Balancing serial and monograph investments, assessing the latest digital format, anticipating new directions in teaching and research—this large undertaking resists all formulas. The Task Force on 21st-Century Research Library Collections defers for detail to the expertise that is spread so impressively across ARL libraries, seeking here to give a big picture of collections: to describe not everything on the map, but the general landscape we face today.

issue-brief-21st-century-collections-2012.pdf

issue-brief-net-neutrality-rules-implications-24jan11.pdf

issue-brief-streaming-films-2010.pdf