Fair use (mostly) triumphant: Judge exonerates campus “e-reserves”
19 05 2012If your collegiate experience was anything like mine, it probably involved frequent trips to the library in order to check out photocopied book chapters on Hegel and Wittgenstein from the “reserves desk” (and involved frequent curses directed to those other readers who, like me, were attempting to cram a chapter an hour before class and had checked out all available copies.) Today, of course, you can just get “e-reserves” through a browser, but the very ease of copying and distribution found in the new systems has publishers worried…
Some publishers think so. Although hesitant to go after educational users over small excerpts, publishers like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications came to believe that many professors were stepping over even the broad lines around “fair use” and depriving the publishers of licensing revenue in the process. In 2008, they launched a major test case, suing Georgia State University in federal court.
In a massive 350-page ruling (PDF) . . . the judge concluded, “There is no reason to believe that allowing unpaid, nonprofit academic use of small excerpts in controlled circumstances would diminish creation of academic works.”
The content in this post was found at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/fair-use-mostly-triumphant-judge-exonerates-campus-e-reserves/ and was not authored by the moderators of freeforafee.com. Clicking the title link will take you to the source of the post.
