Full-text access, etc.

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>All students enrolled in a class are, by definition, part of the academic
community.  Their  access to full-text content should be covered by the
database license.  Any self-respecting institution will provide off-campus
access to subscription databases.

JE:  Where such a license exists, this writer is correct.  Not all licenses
provide for off-campus access, however, and it is not really an
institution's self-respect (self-regard?) that controls this, but the terms
of the licenses, which vary.  And you would expect them to vary, because
content is (mostly) not a commodity and its terms of sale or license are set
by the seller.

But there is a practical issue that is not being addressed in this
discussion.  I hasten to add that I don't want to get into the rights and
wrongs of this but the simple economic reality of pushing the boundaries of
fair use in the digital medium.  If an institution licenses a database for
its entire community, that is the end of the argument:  now you can do
pretty much anything you want with the content.  But what about use in an
individual classroom?  It would not be hard to extrapolate from some of the
arguments on this list that Professor Jones would be protected under fair
use if he purchases a single copy of a chemistry textbook, scans it, and
then mounts it on a Web server for the thirty students in his class.  The
textbook costs (say) $100.  How much do the students pay for this?  How much
goes back to the publisher (and author)?

To make the obvious point: if fair use protects this, investment in new
textbooks will decline.  No, not overnight, but over time capital will
withdraw from this industry segment.  There are precedents:  trade or
consumer publishing.  The primary reason there are few pure-play publicly
traded trade companies (in plain English, the reason you can't buy stock in
Random House and Random House alone) is that investors have abandoned them.

It is for these reasons that publishers have been so slow to embrace digital
media.  As a practical (not moral or legal) matter, a ubiquitous, highly
restricted application of the principle of fair use would result in an
enormous surge of digital publications, many of which would become available
as unlimited domain licenses to institutions.

Joe Esposito
espositoj@xxxxxxx