Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, developed by the Association of Research Libraries and American University.[1] Although we mostly agree with the CONFU guidelines, we disagree with an introductory statement: “The complexities of the electronic environment, and the growing potential for implicating copyright infringements, raise the need for a fresh understanding of fair use.” Horse Feathers! Electronic reserve issues are not terribly complex, and do not require a fresh understanding of fair use. Although it is easy to send a digital copy to lots of people, that does not mean that an entire university community wants to receive—let alone read—the article Professor Quincy Wagstaff assigns to his Huxley College students. With appropriate controls you can minimize the risk of abuse. As an equitable concept, fair use is flexible enough to apply to nearly any type of situation and any type of format: that is its elegance.
A different perspective is offered by the Copyright Clearance Center’s Using Electronic Reserves: Guidelines and Best Practices for Copyright Compliance.[2] The CCC advocates for copyright owners, so we can expect their guidelines to be more conservative. Although we agree with many of the CCC’s recommendations, we think there are a few that go too far in asserting the rights of copyright owners. Here are a few of the CCC guidelines with our comments:
- Comment: Yes, traditional copyright rules still apply when using digital technology, but the rest of this guideline is misleading. The lawsuits that publishers brought against off-campus copy centers selling coursepacks, which we discussed earlier in this chapter, involved facts patterns that are
- ↑ Available at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/code-of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf and reproduced in Appendix M.
- ↑ Available at http://www.copyright.com/content/dam/cc3/marketing/documents/pdfs/Using-Electronic-Reserves.pdf.
draft electronic reserve guidelines may be found on the University of Texas’s Web site at http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/rsrvguid.html and are reproduced in Appendix F.
