Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content

["Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content
http://www.libraryjournal.com/clear/CA6380712.html?nid=2673#news1

The British Academy, a national body for the advancement of 
humanities and social sciences, has released an eye-opening 
report, sponsored by the European Commission, suggesting the 
application of copyright law in the United Kingdom may be 
inhibiting the work of scholars and offering ten 
"recommendations" for redress, including possible government 
regulation of licensing deals. Among the report's conclusions: 
copyright exemptions such as "fair dealing" (fair use) should 
"normally be sufficient for academic and scholarly use," but that 
"problems lie in narrow interpretation," both by rights holders 
and by publishers; that copyright holders, as a result of the 
development of new media, "are more aggressive in seeking to 
maximize revenue from the rights, even if the legal basis of 
their claims is weak;" and that there are "well-founded" concerns 
that new database rights and the development of digital rights 
management systems (DRM) "may enable rights holders to circumvent 
the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate 
research and scholarship."

The report, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social 
Sciences: A British Academy Review was composed by a working 
group of eight members, appointed by the British Academy and 
drawn from a range of subjects in the humanities and social 
sciences along with help from the Centre for the Study of 
Intellectual and Technology Property Law at the University of 
Edinburgh.

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