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"Copyright in the Classroom"
Last week we saw the first real flurry of activity reported in the publisher appeal of the Georgia State University fair use victory. The news items and filings call our attention to both the legal and the political aspects of the appeal.
Starting with the law, over the weekend I gave the publishers’ [...]
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Last week I was attending a meeting on campus that had nothing to do with e-science (which today refers to virtually all science, I suppose) when a very fortuitous event occurred. Professor Jerome Reichman of the Duke Law School handed me a copy of the April 2012 issue of the Minnesota Law Review (vol. 96, [...]
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Note to readers — a commenter has correctly pointed out that I was a bit over-enthusiastic in this post. It is not strictly true that no infringement has been found in any of the cases against libraries. In the Georgia State case the Judge did find five instances of infringement among the seventy-five digital excerpts [...]
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The last month has seen extraordinary changes in the copyright law of Canada, including two Supreme Court decisions that I wish we could import south of the border to the U.S.
At the end of June a comprehensive reform of the Canadian copyright law known as bill C-11 received its final approval in the Canadian [...]
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Now that I am back from vacation and have read the GSU ruling and some of the commentary more thoroughly, I wanted to add a few additional comments. In many cases these may be repetitive of things others have already said; I have not read all the commentary, of course, and some of this writing [...]
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Overall there is good news for libraries in the decision issued late yesterday in the Georgia State University e-reserves copyright case. Most of the extreme positions advocated by the plaintiff publishers were rejected, and Judge Evans found copyright infringement in only five excerpts from among the 99 specific reading that had been challenged in the [...]
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Is it just me, or do there seem to be a lot of lawsuits filed by publishers in the higher education space recently? It is increasingly obvious that the disruption caused by the digital environment has led publishers to embrace litigation as a strategy for protecting their business models, and that that strategy cannot be [...]
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Recently a friend was asking me about my job title. I was hired primarily to address copyright issues, but my title is “Director of Scholarly Communications.” I am, in fact, involved in lots of other issues encompassed by that broader title, but my friend made the valid point that universities are beginning to divide the [...]
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As Duke University’s first Scholarly Communications Officer, Kevin Smith’s principal role is to teach and advise faculty, administrators and students about copyright, intellectual property licensing and scholarly publishing. 
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