Journal of Copyright in Education & Librarianship

Book Review: Drafting Copyright Exceptions: From the Law in Books to the Law in Action

Chris Morrison — 2021-03-19

Drafting Copyright Exceptions: From the Law in Books to the Law in Action by Emily Hudson is essential reading for anyone responsible for managing copyright in libraries and educational and research institutions. Hudson’s monograph presents insights from thousands of hours of empirical research with hundreds of copyright practitioners in the cultural heritage sector. It reveals important findings about the way that copyright exceptions are interpreted in practice and the implications this has for the formation of norms and the drafting of copyright exceptions.

Student Selection of Content Licenses in OER-enabled Pedagogy

Katherine Williams — 2021-06-10

Students acting as content creators is an emergent trend in the field of open educational practice. As more faculty turn towards the use of open pedagogy or OER-enabled Pedagogy, they must be prepared to address concerns related to intellectual property rights of student work. This article addresses student concerns related to intellectual property rights, specifically related to Creative Commons licensing as well as faculty awareness of use of Creative Commons licensing. Research was conducted at a small, liberal arts college in the Appalachian Region of the United States. All first-year students engaged in an OER-enabled Pedagogy project where they collaboratively created a reader for the First Year Studies seminar course. Following class, students and faculty were interviewed regarding how dynamics of intellectual property and Creative Commons licensing impacted the educational process. Results indicate students are open to sharing their works with credit, and value helping others. Faculty tend to be unfamiliar with Creative Commons licensing and must balance the desire to help students understand licensing and prescribing their own preferences when asked about licensing selection.

Formulating a Scalable Approach to Patron-Requested Digitization in Archives

Kevin S. Hawkins — 2021-06-01

The novel coronavirus of 2019 (COVID-19) crisis has forced archives to rethink their modes of providing access to physical collections. Whereas difficult copyright questions raised by reproducing items could previously be skirted by requiring researchers to work with materials in person, the long-term closure of reading rooms and decrease in long-distance travel mean that archives need a workflow for handling user digitization requests that is scalable and requires consulting only easily identifiable information and, assuming full reproduction is off the table, reproducing items in a collection under 17 U.S.C. § 108 or through a strategy of rapid risk assessment. There is a challenge in creating a policy that will work across different formats and genres of archival materials, so this article offers some suggestions for how to think about these parameters according to US copyright law and calls for a committee of experts to work out a model policy that could serve remote users of archival collections even after the COVID-19 crisis has passed.

Opinion: CASE Act will Harm Researchers and Freedom of Inquiry

Sara Benson — 2021-03-18

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (CASE Act) was swept into law during the final days of 2020 as a part of the 5,500 page federal spending bill. In theory, the CASE Act aims to provide a venue for individual creators (such as photographers, graphic artists, musicians) to address smaller copyright infringement claims without spending the time and money required to pursue a copyright infringement lawsuit in Federal court. In reality, however, this additional bureaucratic structure created outside of the traditional court system is fraught with problems that will mostly incentivize large, well-resourced rightsholders or overly litigious copyright owners to take advantage of the system. At the same time, it will confuse and harm innocuous users of content, who may not understand the complexities of copyright law, and who do not know whether or how to respond to a notice of infringement via this small claims process. From our perspective, it will chill users who rely on crucial statutory exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, in their research and teaching activities.