[ccccip] Publishers sue university over publication of class reading materials

[Jeff Galin]

Charlie,
	This case is a counterpart to the coursepack landmark cases, Basic
Books and Kinkos.  It has been brewing for a while.  I'm not surprised by
it.  Interestingly, however, a robust open access movement in our field for
scholarly journal publications could subvert this entire problem.  Like
Music, video, and so many other pre-digital corporate models, publishers are
resisting rather than reinventing their marketing models.  I've been
following the narrowing of fair use for years now and have noticed how the
Copyright Clearance Center has been used by the printing industry to charge
for all residual uses of articles, no matter their source of publication.
The plain fact is publishers are getting away with charging for material
that is clearly fair use under the 1976 Copyright Act.  They continue to
ignore the fact that market impact is only one of four tests and that none
of the four tests is determinative.  

	We should track this case, but I would love to see us draft a
statement that encouraged publishers to rethink their business models.
Rather than trying to recuperate every dime possible, have them consider
letting go of rights in scholarly journals altogether after the first 12 six
to months and agreeing that a single chapter from a given collection can be
used without pay.  Furthermore, I would cite the Bosch v Ball-Kell case as
precedence that the teacher exemption did in fact survive the 1976 Copyright
Act.  I would like publishers to deal directly with the concept of teacher
exemption so that we could set up a bright line set of standards for fair
use for teaching purposes.  There needs to be a compromise so that faculty
stop abusing online reserves and publishers stop charging for fair uses of
copyrighted material.

Cheers,
jrg 

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at ccccip.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ccccip.org] On
Behalf Of Charlie Lowe
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 5:25 PM
To: discuss at ccccip.org
Subject: [ccccip] Publishers sue university over publication of class
reading materials

Will this be a new trend? Georgia State University is being sued by 
academic publishers over use of their copyrighted materials online:

"Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage 
Publications allege the university "facilitated, enabled, encouraged, 
and induced" professors to upload the copyrighted materials to its 
online system for students to download, without first obtaining the 
necessary permissions or paying licensing fees."

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9920388-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-
1_3-0-5

Charlie Lowe

_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss at ccccip.org
http://mail.ccccip.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_ccccip.org