Unit 3 Legal and Ethical Issues

Copyright

An unvarying theme is former articles is the idea that public information policies are mainly structures that connect information originators, users, and libraries into a network of complex relationships.  The Internet’s swift growth, expansion of electronic government initiatives, accompanied by the unvarying pressure to switch our civic literacy from a paper to digital environment produce further forces that weaken the foundational relationships of academic libraries and their home institutions.  Currently, like the biblical dogs of war, Congress and President have passed legislation that releases another set of energies to knit a new pattern: copyright and long-distance education (Schuler, 2003).  

At a most basic level, academic libraries are a technology shaped by users, publishers, and librarians to manage a specific set of intellectual property rights within a particular organizational environment.  Earlier to the historic changes endorsed through the 1976 Copyright Law (Public Law 94-553; 90 Stat. 2541), this relationship was mainly benign and passive.  Persons who required to use books, articles, dramatic works, pictures, plays, reports, newspapers, films, and so forth, within a library were (generally speaking) left lonely to read, share, copy (within reason), and convey to others their “take” on what they were reading and exploring.  If they took a look at a book (or other format) from the library, they could “lend” the copy to someone else, read it out loud to their children (or to strangers in the park), or cautiously copy passages out in long-hand for future reference.  “Fair use” was a type of “gentleman’s agreement” of what was appropriate and inappropriate (and not unlike the prior notion of pornography: “you know it when you see it.”)  Currently, detecting the “copy right” from the “copy wrong,” became easier and libraries were on the side of the angels in the grapple (Schuler, 2003).         

In 1999, Brigham Young University (BYU) designed a new office which works to tackle and settle copyright issues that appeared on campus.  Meanwhile, universities and colleges were, "enduring a paradigm shift from traditional print formats to digital media" (Self-Assessment, p. 1).  The advance of the Copyright Management Office, now called the Copyright Licensing Office, was to confirm compliance with copyright law, to lessen institutional liability and to adopt the digital delivery of materials on campus.  The goal of the Copyright Licensing Office is to offer "(1) copyright education, training and policy advice, (2) secure efficient and proper licensing practices, (3) manage licensing/rights information in a centrally reachable database and (4) measure copyright policy and legal developments").  

Fair Use

The law allows restrained uses and reproduction of copyrighted materials without the owners’ consent.  It is referred to as “fair use.”  The copyright law allows “fair use” of works after pondering four factors:

1. The reason and nature of the use, including if such use is of business nature or is for not-for-profit educational goals;

2. The description of the copyrighted work;

3. The extent and substantiality of the part used proportionate to the copyrighted work overall; and

4. The influence of the use upon the probable market for or value of the copyrighted work (Nguyen, 2010).

The law denotes that suitable fair use aims may include “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research”  (Nguyen, 2010).

References

Schuler, J. A. (2003). Distance Education, Copyrights Rights, and the New TEACH Act. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 29(1), 49.

Nguyen, N. A. (2010). NOT ALL TEXTBOOKS ARE CREATED EQUAL: COPYRIGHT, FAIR USE, AND OPEN ACCESS IN THE OPEN COLLEGE TEXTBOOK ACT OF 2010. Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law, 21(1), 105-130