NUL Copyright and Scholarly Communication

Copyright update

Last week, your friendly neighborhood librarian was probably away in Philadelphia attending the American Library Association's Midwinter Conference. While this has been a quieter year on the copyright legislation front, probably thanks to the upcoming election, there are a few things worthy of an update.

Section 108
As Beth reported back in July, a section 108 study group has been looking at the exemptions in U.S. Copyright Law for libraries and archives, with an eye towards recommending possible changes in the law. Word is that a penultimate draft of their report is due at the end of January, so hopefully we'll be seeing something in the next few months. Sadly, one of the group's members and a giant in the world of copyright and librarianship, Robert L. Oakley, passed away suddenly last September. Bob was director of the Law Library at Georgetown University, where a lovely site remembering Bob and his work has been mounted. The Library Copyright Alliance (ALA is a member) will be establishing a scholarship in his memory.

International Copyright Advocates
The American Library Association's Office of Information Technology Policy launched their International Copyright Advocates program with the appointment of three librarian advocates: Lori Driscoll, Jonathan Franklin and Janice Pilch. They will be attending meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which in many ways has become ground zero for copyright and other IP legislation. As Janice reported to the OITP Copyright Advisory Subcommittee, a lot of recent copyright legislation has some link to or finds its origins in WIPO treaties. Perhaps most memorable for us here in the U.S. was the (in)famous 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, drafted in part to implement the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. Janice also reported that Kenneth Crews (a Northwestern grad!), who recently left Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) for a position as Director of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University, will be doing a study for WIPO on the exemptions for libraries and archives in the copyright laws of countries around the world. This recent post by Georgia Harper about terms of protection for foreign works explains why international copyright law is so important, and so difficult a subject.

ALA will be organizing a conference on traditional knowledge and cultural expression, one of WIPO's current work areas, to take place some time this spring.

Copyright in recorded sound
Did you know that there is a huge exception in U.S. Copyright Law (see section 301c) for recorded sound? Works created before 1972 are not subject to federal copyright protection, but rather to whatever protection is available under common law and the various state copyright statues. However, as the Association for Recorded Sound Collections explains in their "Recommendations for Changes to the United States Copyright Law: Legal Impediments to Preservation and Access to the Audio Heritage of the United States," the result of this exception has been that the effective term of copyright recordings may actually be much longer than for other types of works, and the confusion and uncertainty about what law applies has put many important and rare works in real danger of being lost altogether.

ProIP
I posted recently on the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2007," or PRO IP Act. The ALA Washington Office has posted their Copyright Legislation handout (.doc file) which gives a nice, concise background explaining why this is bad for libraries and bad for users. The handout includes updates about other legislation, including the Orphan Works and FAIR USE legislation, both currently on hold, and a few important recent copyright cases.

NIH Open Access mandate
As I reported last week, NIH-funded researchers are now required to deposit final, peer-reviewed copies of their publications in PubMed Central, an Open Access repository, within 12 months of publication. As reported on the Copyright Advisory Network (CAN) blog, the publishers are mounting some fierce resistance to this. It's a great post, with links to others who explain the issue far better than I could.

Fair use and video
We've been working with colleagues from ALA's Video Round Table, Office of Information Technology Policy, and the Association of College and Research Libraries Copyright Committee on a project to develop a set of fair use principles for the use of video in education. Video is a notoriously complicated area for librarians. Particularly among smaller distributors, differential pricing is common, and it's not unusual for a college or university to pay hundreds of dollars for a title that an individual can purchase for far less. Distributors often state that the higher cost covers a bundled public performance license. There is really no justification for this under the law, as section 110 clearly includes exemptions for teaching, which is the context in which most group video display takes place (I'm talking about for academic and school libraries here, not necessarily public library video collections), and for which no permission or license is needed. When the performance is for entertainment purposes and especially if a fee is charged, it is common to secure a public performance license (PPR) for the use. Over time, this practice has become muddled enough that librarians are often confused about whether or not they MUST purchase a license for any use other than an individual viewing. With the transition to digital, and with rapid changes in video formats, understanding copyright law well enough to respond to user requests for clips, copies, and streaming services has become incredibly difficult for video librarians. A quick search for "fair use" or "copyright" on the VIDEOLIB archives will give you a good sense of this. Our group will be attempting to follow in the footsteps of American University's Center for Social Media, as well as the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Music Library Association, to develop some principles by librarians, for librarians. More about the project here as it unfolds; Beth and I will both be working on this project ... wish us luck!

by Claire Stewart | News | TrackBack