Page:The librarian's copyright companion, by James S. Heller, Paul Hellyer, Benjamin J. Keele, 2012.djvu/79

Chapter Four. Fair Use (Section 107) Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, developed by the Association of Research Libraries and American University. 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. 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:

E-reserves require the same permissions as coursepacks. While there are obvious savings—financial and environmental—from eliminating paper copies of reserves or coursepacks, traditional copyright rules still apply when using digital technology such as e-reserves: the institution must obtain permission from the rightsholder or its agent, who may charge a fee for such permission based on the amount of material and number of people viewing the material (i.e. students).
 * 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