EDUCAUSE | Digital Collections and Federal Copyright Law

Section 108 Copyright Study Group's Report Recently Released

agould — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:19:22 -0500

The Section 108 Copyright Study Group (www.section108.gov), which was assembled to study and look for potential changes to copyright law, released its report on March 31. Established under the watch of the Library of Congress, this group of independent experts was charged with finding areas in copyright law that might need changes in order to better balance the positions of rights holders and "cultural memory organizations such as libraries and archives in the digital world."

The group has worked on this issue for nearly three years. Among their recommendations, they conclude:

Museums should be included for Section 108 eligibility, since they perform many of the same functions as libraries and archives.
A new exception should be added to Section 108 to permit certain qualified libraries and archives to make preservation copies of at-risk published works prior to damage or loss.
Libraries and archives should be permitted to make a limited number of copies to create and maintain a single replacement or preservation copy. This would allow libraries to more securely preserve digital materials.

For more information, please see their full report at:http://www.section108.gov/docs/Sec108StudyGroupReport.pdf.

JSTOR Amicus Brief

ckeller — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:41:46 -0600

EDUCAUSE joined a broad coalition in filing an amicus, or friend of the court, brief on behalf of the National Geographic Society which seeks permission to reproduce a print collective work in electronic format. At issue is ensuring the availability, preservation and dissemination of prior research which is essential for scholarly advancement. Oral arguments are expected to take place in the Eleventh Circuit Court during the week of February 25th, 2008, with a decision rendered at some point thereafter.

Sharing Visual Arts Images for Educational Use: Finding a New Angle of Repose

ckeller — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:04:20 -0500

Educational institutions should be actively rethinking how they are accessing and using copyrighted visual arts images, and they should be exploring an approach that seeks to address copyright owners’ interests, as well as users’ needs, in an environment that encourages increased, shared access to these images for teaching and study.

Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books

drupal — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:14:59 -0600

What are the stumbling blocks to digitization? Is copyright law a major barrier? Is it easier to negotiate with some types of publishers than with others? To what extent does the age of the material influence permission decisions? This report, by Denise Troll Covey, principal librarian for special projects at Carnegie Mellon University, responds to many of these questions. It begins with a brief, cogent overview of U.S. copyright laws, licensing practices, and technological developments in publishing that serve as the backdrop for the current environment. It then recounts in detail three efforts undertaken at Carnegie-Mellon University to secure copyright permission to digitize and provide open access to books with scholarly content.

Scholarship, Instruction, and Libraries at the Turn of the Century

drupal — Thu, 23 Sep 1999 16:53:24 -0500

To understand how technology is changing the nature of scholarship and teaching, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) joined forces to establish five task forces that examined these questions by looking at the special requirements posed by different types of information resources. The deliberations of these task forces are detailed in this report. From the discussions, CLIR extracted all of the recommendations that were proposed by individual task force members. While some clear priorities emerged, the groups did not always attempt to reach consensus on the various recommendations nor to place them in priority order