NUL Copyright

Hirtle on The Gentleman's Agreement of 1935

Peter Hirtle, Intellectual Property Officer for the Cornell University Libraries, published a wonderful article back in March of 2006: Research, Libraries, and Fair Use: The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1935.

I can't recommend this highly enough, it's a great read, a truly fascinating history of the development of an early set of copying guidelines. Anyone who's ever ground their teeth about the "ten percent rule," or wondered how on earth we got ourselves into this strange situation where faculty can't use more than one article per issue per class will be interested in this blow-by-blow account of Robert C. Binkley's campaign to simplify the rules of copying for scholars and harness new reprographic technologies to dramatically increase access to new research.

Binkley recruited Harry Lydenberg, then Director of the New York Public Library, to be the primary negotiator for the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council's Joint Committee on Materials for Research:

"Because of his position, he was in frequent communications with major figures in the New York publishing houses. As Binkley would write to Lydenberg, 'I feel it is a godsend that you should be the man who presents this problem to the publishers.' In retrospect, however, the decision to assign Lydenberg the task of approaching the publishers subtly altered the nature of the discussions. First, the New York Public Library is not directly associated with an educational institution. Lydenberg, therefore, had no experience with how reproductions were being used in teaching and the classroom. In this, Lydenberg's ignorance reinforced Binkley's own bias against including educational use of reproductions in the discussions of the Joint Committee; educational use of materials did not matter to either man."(Hirtle, p.20)

Preprint available via Cornell's DSpace site, article was due to have been published in a 2006 issue of the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A.., though I haven't yet had a chance to verify the cite and exact issue. This journal isn't published electronically but is available in print at NU's law library. Also well worth a visit is Hirtle's recently revised chart, "Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States."

by Claire Stewart | Publications | TrackBack