RE: Fair use (RE: electronic journals CCC)

[Tom Williams <twilliam@bbl.usouthal.edu>]

-- 

On Fri, 4 May 2001, Rick Anderson wrote:

> It's not a question of permitting or not permitting ILL -- I don't agree
> that licenses should forbid ILL entirely.  My argument is that publishers
> are justified in restricting ILL to paper printouts of online articles,
> because electronic distribution is so easy.  This is just common sense: if
> you mail me a photocopy, I can read it myself and maybe pass it around to
> my colleagues.  If you e-mail me an article, I can literally distribute it
> to several thousand people within seconds. 

Tom:  This argument really doesn't hold water in my view.  If a user is
going to cheat the copyright laws, it makes little difference to them,
other than saving a few minutes, to make an E copy or a print copy.  With
paper, all the abuser has to do is stick the article in his/her hotsy
totsy, bells-and-whistles copy machine and run off as many copies as
desired within a very short time.

All libraries that I know of or have worked in ALWAYS adhere to copyright
laws as they understand them to be.

> > Surely the wording of the license clause could be tailored to allow
> > ILL the way libraries have always done, without encouraging the kind
> > of "systematic" distribution you are talking about.
> 
> If what you mean by "the way libraries have always done" is "in physical
> formats," then that sort of wording is what I find reasonable.  I also
> think it's great when publishers allow ILL via electronic means.  But I
> understand when they don't.
> 
> > When it comes to restriction of access and authentication technology,
> > don't publishers/aggregators (at least in academic libraries) actually
> > have more control over who reads their material than when it was simply
> > available in print to anyone who walked into the library?
> 
> Absolutely not.  They may have control over who gets to their content
> initially, but unless a contract governs what the user can do with the
> content afterwards, they have no control whatsoever over what happens
> after that.

Tom:  Still, even with a print copy, a cheater could scan a copy into the
PC and send as many email copies as desired.  Or just send multiple copies
of the print.  The publishers, in reality, have little additional risk.

> I'm saying that it's silly to expect publishers to regard fair use
> limitations as serious copyright protection in the electronic realm, and
> that they're justified in some of the restrictions (in particular, those
> on electronic redistribution) that they put in their licenses.

Tom:  This, then, is the crux of the current dialogue between librarians
themselves, plus librarians and publishers.  My guess is that this will
all be decided eventually by the powers-that-be, most likely the courts.

Tom