Archive for the ‘copyright’ Category

Copyright and E-reserves

Sunday, March 13th, 2011

At eight in the morning on Friday, I left my home in downtown Los Angeles and headed towards Westwood (near Beverly Hills) for a workshop at UCLA. If you’ve never been to UCLA, imagine a lush forest of towering trees peppered with buildings.

When I finally found the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies building, I followed the signs directing me to the Friday Forums workshop, All About Copyright: The Basics and Beyond for Academic Librarians. This workshop was presented by Martin Brennan, Copyright and Licensing Librarian at UCLA Library.

I signed up for this workshop because I still had some questions, even though I understand copyright law reasonably well. In the course of my graduate education at Syracuse University, I had a class called Telecommunications and Information Policy. During this class, I wrote a paper on Fair Use, but I focused on its implications for public libraries, not academic ones.

Now that I work in an academic library, I have questions that need answering. The question I posed to Martin Brennan during introductions was: how do you decide what can go on e-reserves and what must go in a course pack?

Martin’s presentation was surprisingly interesting for such a dry and frustrating topic. He started with the history of copyright and worked his way through to what we face nowadays. He highlighted the sections of the law that effect academic librarians most, including sections 107 (fair use), 108 (reproduction by libraries and archives), 109 (first sale doctrine), and 110 (educational uses), and how to protect authors’ rights when publishing.

Section 110, or the TEACH (Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization) Act of 2002, most relates to the question I asked. It means to govern the use of copyright material in: distance education, hybrid courses (in-person and online), and e-reserves run by academic libraries. The copyrighted material “should be limited to the students in the class to the extent technologically feasible,” or password protected and only while the student is enrolled in the class. In order for this defense to work in court, the educational institution must:

  • be accredited and nonprofit
  • institute policies regarding copyright
  • provide informational materials on copyright compliance to faculty and staff
  • provide notice to students that materials in class may be subject to copyright protection
  • must not store the digital copies beyond period of transmission
  • must apply technological measures to reasonably prevent:
    • access beyond the class session
    • unauthorized further dissemination
  • must not interfere with technological protection measures in the copyrighted material

Martin also explained that UCLA Library provided conservative guidelines for fair use in e-reserves (which are no longer used because of their conservative nature): one article from each journal, one chapter from each book, one poem from each anthology, etc. More might be okay, but it becomes less clear. These are (almost) definitely fair use cases. If an instructor wants to use any more than that, it’s probably best that they provide course packs for the students to buy.

Two of the many useful handouts I received from this workshop are definitely going into my arsenal:

What copyright questions do you have? Does your institution have an e-reserve policy? Do you have any favorite copyright tools?

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