Re: E-Reserves question

[ESperr@xxxxxxx]

Interesting commentary in ATG -- it's always useful to get another 
perspective. However, I am a little confused by your statement that, 
"Because the plaintiffs [in the GSU case] were not seeking damages for 
past infringements but only an injunction against future illegal 
copying...". The proposed injunction (
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/georgia/gandce/1:2008cv01425/150651/300/1.html
) goes a bit further than that. It demands that *all* ereserves activity 
be explicitly bound (no coloring outside the lines ever) by the "Agreement 
on Guidelines for Classroom Copying", which is more restrictive than the 
CONFU recommendation. It also imposes a substantial documentation and 
reporting burden on GSU. Plaintiffs might well believe that they have good 
reasons for asking for these things, but they do go beyond merely 
preventing "illegal copying" as it is currently understood.

I also don't quite understand all the angst about the fact that the 
University System of Georgia has changed its policy since the suit was 
brought. Surely this was one the main strategic goals of the plaintiffs, 
to get the USG to reject its earlier (rather expansive) view of fair use?
 

At 10:49 AM -0400 9/5/11, ESperr@xxxxxxx wrote:
Sandy --

I wonder then if you could comment on the difference between the AAUP 
circa 1996, which seemed to recognize the importance of Fair Use to the 
system of scholarly communication, and the AAUP circa 2011, which (along 
with the plaintiffs in the GSU case) seems to take a breathtakingly 
maximalist position. It is *very* hard to reconcile the proposed CONFU 
guidelines of then with the proposed injunction that the publishers are 
seeking against GSU right now.

I don't see any inconsistency at all. Perhaps you'll understand why if you 
read my article in Against the Grain (March 2010), which you can access 
here: http://www.psupress.org/news/SandyThatchersWritings.html



I agree with Kevin that guidelines like this aren't the be-all-end-all, 
but at the end of the day I need something more concrete to tell my 
faculty than "it depends". On campus, we do try to communicate the notion 
that our policy is a "floor and not a ceiling". Coloring inside the lines 
should always be safe, but there *may* also be uses outside our policy 
that are okay as well.


And that is exactly the reason that i believe many universities decided to 
adopt the CONFU guidelines as a de facto policy. The alternative, which is 
reflected also in many universities' policies, is simply to say that the 
university follows fair use, reproduce Section 107,  and leave it at that.

The checklist championed by Ken Crews at Indiana and Columbia, and adopted 
belatedly at GSU, is somewhere in between these options.


Going forward, I am very much looking forward to the new Fair use guide 
coming from the ARL (
http://chronicle.com/article/Pushing-Back-Against-Legal/127690/)...


I look forward to this also, but would recommend that you take a look at 
the booklet on copyright, written by Michael Les Benedict, that will soon 
be forthcoming from the American historical Association. I saw it in draft 
form and offered comments.  Benedict and I were the two external reviewers 
for the book by Stanley Lindberg and L. Ray Patterson that inspired the 
previous, but now abandoned, GSU policy: 
http://books.google.com/books?id=pTIS8HWvNOgC&dq=the+nature+of+co
pyright+the+law+of+users+rights&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=cqpaTLz4IIGC8gbCiMj8AQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCwQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Ed Sperr, M.L.I.S.
Copyright and Electronic Resources Officer
St. George's University
esperr@xxxxxxx

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