Category Archives: Copyright in the Classroom

Copyright in the Classroom, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Licensing, Scholarly Publishing

We’re back! (and so is the GSU fair use e-reserves appeal…)

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Dave Hansen
Dave Hansen, Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications

After a few months of quiet, I’m happy to say that the Copyright & Scholarly Communication team at Duke is bringing this blog back to life. Since Kevin Smith left to become Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, I have stepped in to take over his old post as Director of the Office of Copyright and Scholarly Communications at Duke. If you’re interested in who I am and what I do, you can check out my new Scholars@Duke profile. I plan to use this blog to cover the same types of issues that Kevin did, especially copyright and publishing, as well as to highlight some of the interesting projects happening here at Duke on those same subjects.

I think it’s only appropriate that my first post is about the Georgia State University e-reserves copyright lawsuit. This blog has more or less chronicled this suit since it was filed in 2008. For anyone unfamiliar, the case is about whether it is fair use for GSU professors to make electronic excerpts of books available to students in their courses.  The plaintiffs Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage argue that in most cases it is not fair use. So far, the courts have mostly decided in favor of GSU regarding the specific uses made by GSU and its faculty.

Publishers’ Brief on Appeal

Publishers' SECOND appeal is again before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals
Publishers file opening brief in their SECOND appeal before the 11th Circuit

On Friday the Publishers filed their opening brief on appeal (their second appeal!) before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. The brief isn’t a huge development. But, it makes some fascinating, and concerning, fair use arguments that are worth discussing. On fair use the brief basically argues:

  1. The lower court didn’t balance the fair use factors correctly. It argues that the court placed too little weight on the fourth fair use factor (whether GSU’s uses harmed the market for the works).
  2. That the lower court made it too hard for Publishers to show that their markets were in fact harmed.

Market harm is critical for the Publishers because they don’t have much else left to argue about. Based on what the appellate court said on the last appeal, the first factor (educational in-class use) strongly favors GSU; the second factor (nature of the work) tends to favor GSU in many cases, though the appellate court said this factor doesn’t count for much, and the third factor (the amount and substantiality used) also tends to favor GSU in most instances

Balancing the Fair Use Factors

The Publishers make some good introductory points about how courts should weigh the fair use factors. The brief recites case law saying that the factors should be balanced together, that there are “no hard evidentiary presumptions” as to what types of uses may be fair, and that the district court should not take a “rigid” or “mathematical” approach to fair use (something that the district court was chided for the first time around on appeal).  So far, so good.

But then comes their core argument about market harm and fair use balancing, which I think fails. It starts by asserting that the lower court was too mechanical in its approach. The brief seizes on a statement made by the lower court, that it “estimates that the initial, approximate respective weights for the four factors as follows: 25% for factor one, 5% for factor two, 30% for factor three, and 40% for market harm.” (Dist. Ct. Op. at 14).

I agree that assessing the numerical percent value of each factor is somewhat unusual. What’s really strange, though, is that you would think that the Publishers would be happy with a mechanical approach under which market harm is weighed as 40% of the analysis—in other words, almost outcome determinative.

Market Harm Above all Else?

Apparently almost outcome determinative isn’t good enough. In a section of the brief that contrasts starkly with those opening (and mostly accurate) statements of the law about balancing the factors together, Publishers argue that no use can be fair use if there is any market harm:

“This (literally) calculated choice of numerical weights . . . produced findings of fair use even where the court found market harm under factor four that weighed against fair use. Indeed, the court made clear its resistance to granting dispositive significance to factor four by stating that while factor four would be given “additional weight,” factor three was “critical” because it was “at the vortex of the holistic evaluation required by the Court of Appeals’ Opinion.”

Like some of the other positions the Publishers have raised in this case, this approach might make sense 30 years ago. In 1985, the Supreme Court announced that the market harm factor is “undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use.” But, the Supreme Court has since walked back this approach. It stated clearly in 1994 in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose that “all [factors] are to be explored, and the results weighed together, in light of the purposes of copyright.”

In the first GSU appeal, the 11th Circuit recognized that Campbell is controlling:  “This language [from Campbell] appears to be inconsistent with any single factor being deemed the single most important.”  The 11th Circuit reasoned, however, that in this case because “the threat of market substitution is severe, it is appropriate in this instance to afford relatively great weight to the fourth factor in the overall fair use analysis.” In fact, the lower court obeyed that direction. It gave market harm 40% weigh in each determination, more than any other factor. It just declined to make market harm outcome determinative, (worth 51% or more, in other words) which is what the Publishers wish for.

Takeaways for Educational Users

The weight given to market harm—even the difference between 40% and 51%, if you want to try to attach a percent value on it—is critically important for educational users. We now live in a world where books never go out of print (print-on-demand). License services are proliferating, and one can buy permission to do an increasingly broad array of activities, such as text or data mining. If courts accept that even the tiniest lost licensing revenue in those markets constitutes a “harm” that is judged to be determinative in the overall fair use analysis, then the rights of educators to use copyrighted works is diminished significantly. We’ll have to wait and see what the 11th Circuit does, but I hope it sees through this argument and upholds the decision of the lower court. 

Copyright in the Classroom, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Scholarly Publishing

Here we go again: latest GSU ruling an odd victory for libraries

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My first thought when I read the new ruling in the Georgia State copyright lawsuit brought by publishers over e-reserves was of one of those informal rules that all law students learn — don’t tick off your judge.  From the first days of the original trial, the arrogant antics of the attorneys representing the publisher plaintiffs — Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publishing — clearly put them in a bad light in the Judge Evans’ eyes. Those chickens came home to roost in this latest opinion, especially where the plaintiffs are chided for having filed a declaration about what licenses were available for excerpts back in 2009, even after the Judge told them not to, since that information had not been introduced as evidence in the original trial.  All of that evidence was stricken, and the Judge based her new opinion on the evidence that was before her in that first trial.  I can imagine that the publishers might use that ruling as a basis for yet another appeal, but if they do so, they had better be able to prove that the evidence is genuine and reliable, and to explain why, if it is, they did not produce it at trial back in 2011.

But I have put the cart before the horse; let’s look at the ruling we just received from the District Court.  In case some have lost track, this case was originally decided by a 2012 ruling by Judge Evans that found infringement in only five of 74 challenged excerpts, and awarded court costs and attorney’s fees to GSU as the “prevailing party” in the case.  The publishers appealed that decision to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which vacated the trial court holding in 2014, sending the case back to Judge Evans with a set of instructions on how to improve the fair use analysis for these challenged excerpts.  As has been noted many times before, the publishers lost nearly all of the big principles they had wanted to establish in the case; the Court of Appeals refuted most of the publishers’ arguments even as it did what they asked and vacated the first ruling.

Now, using the new fair use analysis directed by the Court of Appeals, Judge Evans has handed the publishers yet another loss.  One wonders how many times they will have to lose this case before they finally learn something about the state of copyright law today.  Still, this loss for the publishers is only the oddest sort of victory for libraries.

The new fair use analysis that Judge Evans uses is carefully designed for situations where the challenged use in not transformative; the non-transformative nature of the use means that the small portions used must be scrutinized very carefully, and it means that the fourth factor — the potential impact of the use on the market for or value of the original — gets extra weight.  It is very important to notice this fact, because it means that this analysis used by Judge Evans will not be applicable in many other situations, especially in academia, where the uses are, unlike with e-reserves, transformative.

Even though both the trial court and the Court of Appeals have held that e-reserves are not transformative, both courts have affirmed that the first fair use factor — the purpose and character of the use — will still favor fair use when that purpose is non-profit and educational.  So throughout this new decision, Judge Evans continues to hold that the first factor always favors fair use.

The analysis of the other factors has changed, however.  For factor two, the nature of the original, Judge Evans does not make a blanket assumption, owing to instructions from the Eleventh Circuit, but looks at the nature of each excerpt.  In most cases, she finds that informational matter is mixed with more individualized scholarly commentary, and the result is that this factor is usually neutral — neither favoring nor disfavoring fair use.  In the few cases where it counts against fair use, it has little impact (the Judge says this factor is only 5% of each decision).

In the same way, factor three now gets a more careful and specific analysis.  The 10% or one chapter rule that Judge Evans used in her first opinion is gone, at the instruction of the Court of Appeals.  Instead, Judge Evans looks at each excerpt and evaluates its appropriateness to the allowable purpose (from factor one) and its potential to substitute for a purchase of the book (market substitution, anticipating factor four).  In many cases, she finds that the excerpts are a very small number of pages and a small percentage of the entire work (so not a market substitute), are are also narrowly tailored to accomplish a specific teaching objective.  In those cases, this factor will favor fair use.

Factor four, which the Judge now believes should constitute 40% of the fair use decision in this particular situation, is where most of the action is in this ruling.  The analysis, the Judge says, is two-fold, looking at both harm to the potential market for the original and harm to the value of the work, which means looking at the importance of the licensing market.  About this latter source of potential value, the Judge says that she must decide “how much this particular revenue source contributed to the value of the copyright in the work, noting that where there is no significant demand for excerpts, the likelihood of repetitive unpaid use is diminished” (p. 9).  The result of this inquiry is that a lot of financial information about each book — its sales over time and the amount of revenue derived from the permissions market — is very important in the fourth factor analysis.  The charts for many of the books that reflect this information make for fascinating reading, and contain information I suspect the publishers would rather not have made public.  This is where it becomes most difficult for libraries to apply the analysis that Judge Evans is using, because the Court has access to information, and time to analyze it, that is not available to libraries as they consider e-reserve requests.  Still, I think it is important to note that the standard the Judge is using in this evaluation is pretty high and it is focused on value to the authors and to users:

[W]e must determine how much of that value (the value of the work to its author and the potential buyers) the implied licensee-fair users can capture before the value of the remaining market is so diminished that it no longer makes economic sense for the author — or a subsequent holder of the copyright — to propagate the work in the first place (page 8, quoting the 11th Circuit).

In other words, this analysis is opening up a significant space in the idea of market harm, which permits potential fair users to diminish the value of the work in question to some degree, as long as that reduction in value is not so steep as to discourage writing and publishing these academic books.  Licensing, in this analysis, is the remedy only for that kind of steep loss of value; it is not a mere right of the copyright holder to obtain all the value from the work that is possible.

Judge Evans applied this complex formula for fair use to 48 challenged excerpts.  It was only 48 because for 26 of the ones discussed in her original ruling she found that there had been no prima facie case for copyright infringement made out, either because the publishers could not show they held the copyright or because there was no evidence that any students had used the excerpt.  This part of the ruling was not challenged, so only these 48 fair use rulings had to be redone.  Bottom line is that she found fair use for 41 of the 48, and infringement only in seven cases.  As Brandon Butler points out in his discussion of the ruling, even that might overestimate the infringement, since it appears that the summary in the decision may list at least some instances of infringement that were actually found, in the specific analysis, to be fair use.

So this ruling, like each ruling in the case, is clearly a disaster for the plaintiff publishers.  Once again it establishes that there is significant space for fair use in higher education, even when that use is not transformative.  Nevertheless, it is a difficult victory for libraries, in the sense that the analysis it uses is not one we can replicate; we simply do not have access to the extensive data about revenue, of which Judge Evans makes such complex use.  So what can libraries do, now that we have this additional “guidance” about e-reserves from the courts?  I think there are two fundamental takeaways.

First, we should continue to do what we have been doing — making careful fair use decisions and relying on those decisions when we feel the use is fair.  While we do not have much of the information used by the Court in this latest ruling, we still do have the security provided by section 504 (c)3 of the copyright law, which tells us that if we make good faith fair use decisions we, as employees of non-profit educational institutions or libraries, are not subject to statutory damages.  This greatly lowers our risk, and adds to the disincentive to sue academic libraries that must surely stem from the GSU experience.  All we can do, then, is to continue to think carefully about each instance of fair use, and make responsible decisions.  We still have some rules of thumb, and also some places where we will need to think in a more granular way.  But nothing in these rulings need fundamentally upset good, responsible library practice.

The second takeaway from this decision is that we should resort to paying for licenses only very rarely, and when there is no other alternative.  The simple fact is that the nature of the analysis that the Court of Appeals pushed Judge Evans into is such that licensing income for the publishers narrows the scope for fair use by libraries.  To my mind, this means that whenever we are faced with an e-reserves request that may not fall easily into fair use, we should look at ways to improve the fair use situation before we decide to license the excerpt.  Can we link to an already licensed version?  Can we shorten the excerpt?  Buying a separate license should be a last resort.  Doing extensive business with the Copyright Clearance Center, including purchase of their blanket campus license, is not, in my opinion, a way to buy reassurance and security; instead, it increases the risk that our space for fair use will shrink over time.

[personal note — this will certainly be my last word here at the Scholarly Communications @ Duke site, and it is fitting that it deal with the Georgia State case, about which this site has seen so much commentary.  For the sake of continuing this conversation and including more discussants, I am also going to post this piece on the new group blog of which I am a part, IO: In the Open.  Apologies if the repetition is annoying to anyone.]

Copyright in the Classroom, Copyright Information Notes, Fair Use, Libraries

Copyright MOOCs, new and refreshed

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When my colleagues Anne Gilliland and Lisa Macklin and I released our first Coursera MOOC about copyright, called Copyright for Educators and Librarians, we were very pleased with the reaction.  Although our enrollment for that first MOOC was, at just over 10,000 participants, rather low by MOOC standards, we had a higher than normal percentage of completions, and the feedback we got from colleagues was quite positive.

That course ran in the summer of 2014.  In July of 2015, we were able to release a new version of the same course in an on-demand format, meaning that participants are able to start the course whenever they wish and can proceed at their own pace without a proscribed ending point.

The move to on-demand is important because it brought us a bit closer to our overall goal, which has been to provide a form of copyright education that is accessible in the several sense of that word to all of our colleagues in education, especially.  The course is still free, although there is a small fee if the participants want to receive a “verified certificate” of completion.  We began this project aware that the Center for Intellectual Property at UMUC had recently closed, so the education community had lost access to their series of course offering on copyright that carried continuing education credit.  Our hope was to provide an opportunity to learn about copyright that was free to all, but also could be used, through the verified certificates, by those colleagues who want to learn about the subject AND get some form of (less expensive) credit for this professional development activity.

Now we have taken another big step toward that goal, with the release today of our second MOOC, on Copyright for Multimedia.  Like the first course, this MOOC is on-demand, free to take, and relatively short – four substantive modules and an introduction.  In this second course, the modules focus on four different media – data, images, music and film.  It grew out of our awareness how often the questions brought to us focus on different media.  Many of our colleagues seem confused about how copyright “rules” from the print world, apply in an environment rich with diverse forms of expression and communication.  This confusion is understandable, since copyright was born with print technology and continues to adapt only uncomfortably to these “new” media.

When we are asked about what “copyright for music,” or “copyright for film,” looks like, we try to emphasis that the one copyright law in the U.S. is intended to apply without regard to medium of expression.  Nevertheless, it is perfectly true that some provisions of the law are media-specific.  More significantly, the circumstances in which different media are used are often quite different from the more familiar facts surrounding the use and distribution of print.  There is an lawyer’s maxim that says, “change the facts and you change the outcome,” and that is never more true that when we are talking about different media.

Our new MOOC tries to address these differences, and also to further develop the framework for analyzing a copyright issue that we built in the first course.  Now that both MOOCs are available on the Coursera platform, we hope that they will be a continuing resource to improve copyright understanding for our colleagues.

I want to add a couple of personal notes to this announcement of the two-part series of MOOCs on copyright.

First, I want to say what a wonderful experience it has been to work with Lisa and Anne, who are as smart and creative about teaching as they are about copyright, as well as with the online course team at Duke.  I want especially to note my sense of awe at the creative, complex and realistic scenarios that Anne Gilliland can think up to tease out the implications of copyright in different situations; I hope our participants find them as thought-provoking and amusing as I do.

Second, because of the announcement issued today about my new position as Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, and thus my departure from Duke, it seems unlikely that I will participate in any more MOOCs in this series.  Our original plan was for three courses, but the two we now have stand alone and, we hope, also work together as a series.  It is now an open question whether there will be a third MOOC in this series, but the process of creating these two has been delightful, and the product, I profoundly hope, useful to our colleagues and to many others.

Copyright in the Classroom, Libraries

Swatting three bugs at once

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In was warm here in North Carolina over the Thanksgiving holiday, and, like many of our neighbors, we left our doors open during the day to enjoy the pleasant breeze.  The downside, however, was that while watching a football game on Sunday, I found myself swatting ineffectively at several small insects that found their way into the house in spite of our screens.  I was reminded of that experience today (the weather is sadly much cooler) when a question about ILL and DVDs was forwarded to me.  It seemed there were three different misapprehensions at work in the question, so I want to take this opportunity to swat these three “bugs” in one blog post (but I am absolutely am not comparing any of the folks who posed this question to insects; it is just that the misunderstandings of copyright law represented therein are “pesky”).  In addition to debunking these three worries, I also want to acknowledge two caveats that arose as I discussed this situation with some colleagues.

So here is the problem.  A librarian is searching for a DVD of a relatively obscure foreign-language film from 1938, and concludes that she cannot obtain a copy through ILL because the professor who is requesting the film plans to show it in her classroom.  The request went to a librarian list as a plea for help in finding a copy of the film to purchase because, the librarian had concluded, ILL was not an option.

As I say, I think there are three potential misapprehensions behind this conclusion that sometimes cause librarians to restrict their options for obtaining material out of a misplaced fear of copyright problems.

The first possible reason someone might be hesitant in this situation is the notion that audio/visual works cannot be loaned through ILL.  It is easy to see the source of this mistake, since various A/V materials are explicitly excluded from the two provisions in section 108 of the copyright law that authorize copying for ILL (subsections d and e).  But we must remember that those two subsections of section 108 are only about making copies for ILL; they have no impact on the issue of loaning originals.  So where an original of a DVD (that is, a lawfully-made copy that is made with the direct authorization of the rights holder) is requested, ILL is perfectly OK.

Now here is one of the caveats.  Many institutions decide not to loan audio/visual works because of work flow and availability issues.  They may fear damage that can occur during mailing.  Those are perfectly fine reasons to decline to loan a DVD, and the holding library is entitle to make such a decision.  Just because the law allows a practice does not mean any particular person or entity is required to do it.  But it is important to recognize that a decision not to loan A/V works through ILL is just that, a decision.  It is not based on a legal prohibition.

The next potential misconception here is that the doctrine of first sale, which is what really does underlie all lending of originals from a U.S. library, somehow does not apply to the particular DVD in question.  But first sale, found in section 109 of the copyright act, does allow the lending of any type of original of a copyright-protected work (with a narrow exception for computer software that is not relevant to this discussion).  Whether it is a copy of a book, a filmstrip, a music CD, or a DVD, first sale — which is an exception to the exclusive right over distribution — allows lending of the lawfully made original.  It does not matter if that loan is accomplished through ILL, or library reserve, or simply between two friends.  Nor does it matter, after the Supreme Court ruling in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley, where the lawfully-made original came from; as long as it was original made with the consent of the rights holder (i.e. not a bootlegged copy) it can be loaned.

Here is a good place for my second caveat.  These rules from the copyright act about ILL, lending of originals and, in a moment, classroom showings, are default rules.  They are in place unless they have been changed by an agreement between individual parties.  Where there is such an agreement, it is the agreement that provides the rules and restrictions for those parties, while the default rules of the copyright law apply to everyone else and in regard to any other topic or material.  So if the specific DVD was obtained under a license that prohibited lending or ruled out classroom showings, that license should be obeyed.  Likewise if the film is part of a licensed database.  But most individual DVDs do not come with their own license.  Instead, they are purchased under the default rules for distribution, performance, and lending that I am describing here.

Which brings me to the last potential misunderstanding, that a borrowed DVD cannot be used for a classroom showing.  Classroom showing is allowed, as most academics know, as an exception to the exclusive right over public performance.  Actually, the exception is somewhat broader than in-class performance; it allows a public performance or display of a copyrighted work in any “face-to-face teach activity” that takes place in “a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction.”  So it is easy to imagine a film showing that would qualify, as part of an in-person teaching activity, even when not directly connected to a scheduled class or a regular course.  More importantly, for our issue, the copy used for such a showing need only be “lawfully-made,” the same requirement as for the application of first sale, described above.  There is nothing to prevent a classroom showing of a DVD that is borrowed from the library, from Redbox, from your neighbor, or through ILL.

This problem has given us a chance to examine three potential misunderstandings that can sometimes cause librarians to restrict their own activities unnecessarily, out of fear of copyright issues.  It is easy to see how such misconceptions arise, since the law is complicated on these points.  But, properly understood, the law often gives more leeway to libraries than we often realize.  It is nice to have the chance to dispel these myths.  Now if I could just get those bugs out of the house!

Copyright in the Classroom, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Scholarly Publishing

Can this gulf be bridged?

Litigants in court cases often disagree sharply about the law and its application to the facts, so it is probably not a surprise that the briefs filed in the District Court’s re-examination of its ruling in the Georgia State copyright infringement trial should see the issues in such starkly different terms.

If you read the publishers’ brief, the 11th Circuit decision that sent the case back to the District Court changed everything, and every one of those 70 excerpts found to be fair use at trial now must be labeled infringement.  This is absurd, of course, and I don’t actually believe that the publishers expect, or even hope, to win the point.  They want a new ruling that they can appeal.  In my opinion the publisher strategy has now shifted from an effort to “win” the case, as they understand what winning would mean, to a determination to keep it going, in order to profit from ongoing uncertainty in the academic community (and, possibly, to spend so much money that GSU is forced to give up).

On the other hand, the brief from Georgia State, filed last Friday, argues that all 70 of those challenged excerpts are still fair use.  It seems likely that the actual outcome will be somewhere in the middle, and, to be fair to them, GSU does recognize this, by making a concession the publishers never make.  For a number of excerpts where a digital license was shown to be available at the time of the trial, GSU argues that the available licenses were not “reasonable” because they force students to pay based on what they are getting access to, whether or not the specific excerpt is ever actually used.  This is an interesting argument, tracking a long-standing complaint in academic libraries.  If the court accepts it, it would dramatically restructure the licensing market.  But GSU also seems to recognize that this is a stretch, and ends several of its analyses of specific excerpts by saying that the specific use “should be found to be fair if the Court finds the licensing scheme unreasonable, and unfair if the Court finds the licensing scheme reasonable.”  So it seems GSU is prepared for what I believe is the most likely outcome of this reconsideration on remand — a split between fair uses and ones that are not fair that is different than the original finding — probably with some more instances of infringement — but still a “split decision.”

The availability of licenses is one of the interesting issues in these briefs.  The publisher plaintiffs now argue that licenses were available, back in 2009, for those excerpts where the judge said no licenses were “reasonably available.”  They are continuing to try to introduce new evidence to this effect; which is something GSU vigorously opposes.  But those of us who have been involved in e-reserves for a while remember clearly that such licenses were not available at all through the CCC from Cambridge University Press and only occasionally from Oxford.  So what is this new evidence (which the publishers’ brief says was not offered before because they were so surprised that it was being requested)?  It is an  affidavit from a VP at the CCC, and my best guess is that it would argue that licenses were “reasonably available” because it was possible, through the CCC system, to send a direct request to the publisher in those instances where standard licenses for digital excerpts were not offered.  GSU argues that the evidence gathering phase of the case is over, a ruling about licenses has been made and affirmed by the Court of Appeals, and the issue settled.  A lot will depend on how Judge Evans views this issue; so far she has ruled against admitting new evidence.

Another controversy, about which I wrote before, involves whose incentive is at stake.  The Court of Appeals wrote a lengthy discussion of the incentive for authors to write, and its importance for the fundamental purpose of copyright.  To this they appended an odd sentence that says they are “primarily concerned… with [publisher’s] incentive to publish.”  The publishers, of course, hang a lot of weigh on this phrase, and take it out of context to do so.  GSU, on their side, make a rather forced argument intended to limit the impact of the sentence.  Neither side can admit what I believe is the truth here: that that one sentence was inserted into an opinion where it does not fit because doing so was a condition of the dissenting judge for keeping his opinion as a “special concurrence” rather than the dissent it really was.  If I am right, this compromise served the publishers well, since they can now cite the phrase from the actual opinion of the Court; it is seldom useful to cite a dissent, after all.  So the publishers quote this phrase repeatedly and use it to argue that all of the factors really collapse into the fourth factor, and that any impact at all, no matter how small, on their markets or potential markets effectively eliminates fair use.  Authors, and the reasons that academic authors write books and articles, do not appear in the publishers’ analysis, as, indeed, they could not if the argument for publisher hegemony over scholarship is to be maintained.

GSU, as we have already seen, takes a more balanced approach.  For the first factor, they discount the publishers’ attempt to make “market substitution” a touchstone even at that point in the analysis, and focus instead on the 11th Circuit’s affirmation that non-profit educational use favors fair use even when transformation is not found.  The GSU brief fleshes this out nicely by discussing the purpose of copyright in relationship to scholarship and teaching.  On the second factor, GSU discusses author incentives directly, which in my opinion is the core of the second factor, even though courts seldom recognize this.  GSU also points out that the publishers have ignored the 11th Circuit’s instruction, both here and in the third factor analysis, to apply a case-by-case inquiry to those factors; instead, the publishers assert that since every book contains some authorial opinion, the second factor always disfavors fair use, and that no amount is small enough to overcome the possibility of “market substitution.”  For their part, GSU introduces, albeit briefly, a discussion of the content of each excerpt (they are often surveys or summaries of research) for the discussion of factor two, and of the reason the specific amount was assigned, in regard to factor three.

As I said, these differences in approach lead to wildly different conclusions.  Consider these paragraphs by which each side sums up its fair use analysis for each of the excerpts at issue:

The publishers end nearly every discussion of a specific passage with these words — “On remand, the Court should find no fair use as to this work because: (1) factor one favors fair use only slightly given the nontransformativeness of the use; (2) factor two favors Plaintiffs, given the evaluative/analytical nature of the material copied; (3) factor three favors Plaintiffs because even assuming narrow tailoring to Professor _____________’s pedagogical purpose, it is counterbalanced by the threat of market substitution, especially in light of the repeated use; and (4) factor four “strongly favors Plaintiffs,” and is entitled to “relatively great weight,” which tips the balance as to this work decidedly against fair use. ”

On the other side, GSU closes many discussions (although there is more diversity in their analysis and their summations than in the publishers’) this way — “Given the teaching purpose of the use, the nature of the work and the decidedly small amount used, the fact that this use did not supplant sales of the work, and the lack of digital licensing, the use of this narrowly tailored excerpt constituted fair use.”

These are starkly contrasting visions of what is happening with these excerpts and with electronic reserves, as practiced at a great many universities, as a whole.  It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how Judge Evans decides between such divergent views.

Copyright in the Classroom, Copyright Issues and Legislation, Fair Use, Libraries

Swimming in muddy waters

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Since the ruling from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Georgia State copyright case came out two weeks ago, most commentators have come to the same conclusions.  It is a mostly negative ruling, in which publishers actually lost a lot of what they were fighting for.  Georgia State also lost, in the sense that the case is not over for them and they are no longer assured of being reimbursed for their attorney’s fees and court costs, as Judge Evans had originally ordered.  But apart from those parties to the case, has the library community lost by this decision, or gained?  Once again, what we have gained is mostly negative — we know that we do not have to strictly observe the 1976 Classroom Copying Guidelines, we know that the cases involving commercially-produced course packs do not dictate the fair use result for e-reserves, we know that 10% or one chapter is not a bright line rule.  But there is little benefit in knowing how NOT to make fair use decisions; it is easy to see why one commentator has pled for bright line rules.

One affirmative point we can take from the case is that we know we still can, and must, do item-by-item analyses to make fair use decisions.  But what exactly should the process for those decisions look like?

As Brandon Butler from American University has pointed out, the decision-making processes will be different when we are assessing uses for teaching that are transformative versus those, like e-reserves, that are not.  We still have a good deal of freedom when the use is transformative — when the original material becomes part of a new expression, a new meaning, or a new purpose.  And this is important for a great deal of scholarship and teaching.  We should not lose sight of this important application of fair use, or assume, incorrectly, that the 11th Circuit ruling creates new limits on transformative fair use.

But when we must make decisions about digital course readings, we need to apply the “old-fashioned” four factor test.  What does it look like after the Appeals Court ruling?  I am afraid it has gotten pretty muddy:

The first fair use factor — the purpose and character of the use — continues to favor fair use whenever that use is undertaken by a non-profit educational institution.  If a commercial intermediary is involved, as was the situation in the course pack cases, this is no longer true.  But where there is no profit being made and the user is the educational institution itself, the first factor supports a claim of fair use.  And that is where the clarity ends.

The second factor — the nature of the original — can go either way, depending on the specifics of the work involved.  Is it more factual or interpretive?  This is a judgment call, and one which librarians may be hard-pressed to make when processing a number of e-reserve requests in a discipline they are unfamiliar with.  The good news is that the Court said that this factor is relatively unimportant, so the safest course may be to consider this factor neutral; call it a draw — at least where the item is not clearly creative — and move on.

On the third factor we thought we had a rule, even if many of us didn’t like it — 10% or one chapter was the amount that Judge Evans said was “decidedly small” and therefore OK for fair use for digital course readings.  The bad news is that we no longer have that rule.  The good news is that we no longer have that rule.  The 11th Circuit panel wanted a more nuanced approach, that balances amount with the other factors and especially looks at how appropriate the amount used is in relation to the educational purpose.  When the other factors line up in favor of fair use, this approach could well allow more than 10%.  If the other factors tend to disfavor fair use, only a much shorter portion might be permissible.  It is just very hard, after this ruling, to have clear standards about the amount that is usable, and that makes things difficult for day-to-day decisions.

With the fourth factor — impact on the market for the original — the 11th Circuit made things even more unclear.  The panel actually affirmed the lower court in its analysis of this factor, emphasizing that it is permissible to take into account the availability of a license for the specific use as part of evaluating this factor.  So if a license for a digital excerpt is unavailable, does that mean this factor favors fair use, as Judge Evans said?  Maybe, but the 11th Circuit added two complications.  First, it said that the Judge should have included the importance of license income to the value of the work in her fourth factor reasoning, rather than treating it as an additional consideration for breaking “ties.”  Second, they said that the fourth factor should have more weight in non-transformational settings.  How are we to put these instructions into practice?  Libraries do not have access to publishers’ accounts, as the judge did, so we cannot assess the importance of licensing income (nor can we trust publishers to give us straight answers about that importance).  And what does more weight mean?  If there is no digital license available, does more weight on this factor mean more room for fair use, perhaps of a larger excerpt?  Again, maybe.  But it also seems to mean that where such a license is available, even 10% or one chapter might be too much for fair use.

How does one swim in water that is this muddy?  The answer, of course, is very carefully.  We must keep on making those decisions, and we do have space to do so.  The fair use checklist, by the way, received a relatively sympathetic description from the 11th Circuit, but not a definite embrace.  At this point, my best advice is to keep on doing what we have been doing, thinking carefully about each situation and making a responsible decision.  I would recommend a somewhat more conservative approach, perhaps, than I might have done three weeks ago, especially when a license for a digital excerpt is available.  But the bottom line is that the situation is not much different than we have always known it to be, there is just a little more mud in the water.

Copyright in the Classroom, Libraries, Licensing, Technologies

Planning for musical obsolescence

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Gustavo Dudamel is one of the most celebrated conductors of his generation.  As Music Director of both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela, he has built a solid and enthusiastic following amongst lovers of symphonic music.  He is also, according to his website bio, deeply committed to “access to music for all.”  So it is particularly poignant that a recording by Dudamel should serve as the prime example of a new access problem for music.

When Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic release a new recording of a live performance of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, it should be a significant event, another milestone in the interpretation of that great work.  But in this particular case we are entitled to wonder if the recording will really have any impact, or if it will drop into obscurity, almost unnoticed.

Why would such a question arise?  Because the Dudamel/LA Philharmonic recording was released only as a digital file and under licensing terms that make it impossible for libraries to purchase, preserve and make the work available.  When one goes to the LA Philharmonic site about this recording of Symphonie Fantastique and tries to purchase it, one is directed to the iTunes site, and the licensing terms that accompany the “purchase” — it is really just a license — restrict the user to personal uses.  Most librarians believe that this rules out traditional library functions, including lending for personal listening and use in a classroom.  Presumably, it would also prevent a library from reformatting the work for preservation purposes in order to help the recording outlive the inevitable obsolescence of the MP3 or MP4 format.  Remember that the section 108 authorization for preservation copying by libraries has restrictions on digital preservation and also explicitly allows contractual provisions to override that part of the law.

At a recent consultation to discuss this problem, it was interesting to note that several of the lawyers in the room encouraged the librarians to just download the music anyway and ignore the licensing terms, simply treating this piece of music like any other library acquisition.  Their argument was that iTunes and the LA Philharmonic really do not mean to prevent library acquisitions; they are just using a boilerplate license without full awareness of the impact of its terms.  But the librarians were unwilling.  Librarians as a group are very law-abiding and respectful of the rights of others.  And as a practical matter, libraries cannot build a collection by ignoring licensing terms; it would be even more confusing and uncertain than it is to try to comply with the myriad licensing terms we encounter every day!

In the particular case of the Dudamel recording of Berlioz, we know rather more about the situation than is normal, because a couple of intrepid librarians tried valiantly to pursue the issue.   Judy Tsou and John Vallier of the University of Washington tracked the rights back from the LA Philharmonic, through Deustche Grammophon to Universal Music Group, and engaged UMG in a negotiation for library-friendly licensing.  The response was, as librarians have come to expect, both inconsistent and discouraging.  First, Tsou and Vallier were told that an educational license for the download was impossible, but that UMG could license a CD.  Later, they dropped the idea of allowing the library to burn a CD from the MP3 and said an educational license for download was possible, but only for up to 25% of the “album.”  For this 25% there would be  a $250 processing fee as well as an unspecified additional charge that would make the total cost “a lot more” than the $250.  Even worse, the license would be limited to 2 years, making preservation impossible. The e-mail exchange asserts that UMG is “not able” to license more than 25% of the album for educational use, which suggests that part of the problem is that the rights ownership and licensing through to UMG is tangled.  But in any case, this is an impossible proposal.  The cost is absurd for one quarter of an album, and what sense does it make for a library to acquire only part of a performance like this for such a limited time? Such a proposal fundamentally misunderstands what libraries do and how important they are to our cultural memory.

Reading over the documents and messages in this exchange, it is not at all clear what role Maestro Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic have in this mess.  It is possible that they simply do not know how the recording is being licensed or that it is unavailable for libraries to acquire and preserve.  Or they may think that by releasing the recording in digital format only they are being up-to-date and actually encouraging access to music for everyone.  In either case, they have a responsibility to know more about the situation, because the state of affairs they have allowed impedes access, in direct contradiction to Maestro Dudamel’s express commitment, and it ensures that this recording will not be part of the ongoing canon of interpretation of Berlioz.

As far as access is concerned, the form of its release means that people who cannot afford an MP3 player will not be able to hear this recording.  Many of those people depend on libraries, and that option will be closed to them because libraries cannot acquire the album.  Also, access will become impossible at that inevitable point in time when this format for digital music becomes obsolete.  Maybe UMG and the Philharmonic will pay attention and release the recording on a different format before that happens, but maybe they won’t.  The most reliable source of preservation is libraries, and they will not be there to help with this one.  So access for listeners 20 or 30 years from now is very much in question.

This question of the future should have great consequence for Maestro Dudamel and the orchestra.  Without libraries that can collect their recording, how will it be used in classrooms in order to teach future generations of musicians?  Those who study Berlioz and examine the performance history of the Symphonie Fantastique simply may not know about this performance by Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic.  That performance, regardless of how brilliant it is, may get, at best, a footnote in the history of Berlioz — “In 2013 the Symphonie Fantastique was recorded by the LA Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel; unfortunately, that recording is now lost.”  These licensing terms matter, and without due attention to the consequences that seemingly harmless boilerplate like “personal use only” can produce, a great work of art may be doomed to obscurity.

Copyright in the Classroom, Libraries, Scholarly Publishing, Technologies

Please propose to us

Later this year, the first in a new series of Scholarly Communication Institutes will be held here in the Research Triangle and we are looking for proposals from diverse and creative teams of people who are interested in projects that have the potential to reshape scholarly communications.

Last year the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded a three-year project to continue the long-running Scholarly Communications Institute which has previously been held at the University of Virginia.  Starting in November, the new SCI will be hosted by Duke in close collaborations with UNC Chapel Hill, NC State University, North Carolina Central University and the Triangle Research Libraries Network.  This new iteration of the SCI will benefit, we believe, from the extraordinary depth and diversity of resources related to innovation in scholarly communications here in the Triangle, and it will also take on a new format, in which participants will have a major role in setting the agenda each year.

Starting this year — starting right now! — the SCI invites applications from working groups of 3 – 8 people that are organized around a project or problem that concerns scholarly communications.  These working groups can and should be diverse, consisting of scholars, librarians, publishers, technologists and folks from outside academia (journalist? museums? non-profits?).  We hope that proposals will be very creative about connections, and include people that would like to work together even if they have not previously been able to do so.

The SCI Advisory panel will select 3 to 5 of these working group proposals and cover the costs for those teams to travel to the Triangle and spend four days together  in Chapel Hill in a setting that is part retreat, part seminar, part development sprint and part un-conference.  We want these groups to work together and to interact.  The groups will, we hope, jump-start their own projects and “cross-pollinate” ideas that will advance and challenge each others projects and discussions.

The theme for the 2014 SCI is Scholarship and the Crowd.  It will be held November 9-13 at the Rizzo Center in Chapel Hill, NC.  Proposals are due by March 24.

The goal of the SCI is not to schedule breakthroughs but create conditions that favor them.  The Working Groups selected will set the agenda and define the deliverables.  The Institute will offer the space , the environment and the network of peers to foster creative thinking, with the hope of both advancing the specific projects and also developing ideas and perspectives that can give those projects a broader potential to influence the landscape of publishing, digital humanities and other topics related to scholarly communications.

If you or someone you know might be interested in developing a proposal for this first Triangle-based SCI, you will find the call for proposals and an FAQ at trianglesci.org.

 

Copyright in the Classroom, international IP, Libraries, Open Access and Institutional Repositories

Taking a stand

When I wrote a blog post two weeks ago about libraries, EBSCO and Harvard Business Publications, I was attending the eIFL General Assembly in Istanbul, and I think the message I wanted to convey — that librarians need to take a stand on this issue and not meekly agree to HBP’s new licensing fee — was partly inspired by my experiences at the eIFL GA.

Having attended two eIFL events in the past four years, I have learned that many U.S. librarians are not aware of the work eIFL does, so let me take a moment to review who they are.  The core mission of eIFL is to “enable access to knowledge in developing and transition countries.”  They are a small and distributed staff that work on several projects, including support for the development of library consortia in their partner countries, negotiating licenses for electronic resources on behalf of those consortia, developing capacity for advocacy focused on copyright reform and open access, and encouraging the use of free and open source software by libraries.  The key clientele for eIFL are academic libraries, and all of the country coordinators and delegates that I met at the General Assembly were from colleges and universities.  But eIFL also has a project to help connect communities to information through public libraries in the nations they serve.

The delegates at the General Assembly came from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa.  These librarians face a variety of local conditions and challenges, but they share a common commitment to improving information access and use for the communities they serve.  It was the depth and strength of that commitment that I found so inspiring at the event.  I wanted to encourage U.S. librarians to take a stand because these librarians from all over the world are themselves so consistently taking a stand.

One way these librarians are taking a stand is in negotiations with publishers.  There were lots of vendor and publishing representatives at the General Assembly, and time for each delegation to speak with each vendor (“speed dating”) was built in to the schedule.  Although these meetings were short, they were clearly intense.  One vendor rep told me that they were difficult because the librarians had diverse needs and were well-versed for the negotiations.  He also told me that he enjoyed the intensity because it went beyond “just selling.”  And that is the key.  These librarians are supporting each other, learning from each other and from speakers at the event what they can expect and what they can aspire to with their electronic resources, and taking those aspirations, along with their local needs, into negotiations.  They are definitely not “easy” customers because they are well-informed and willing to fight for the purchases that best serve their communities.  Because they cannot buy everything, they buy very carefully and drive hard bargains.

Another area in which these eIFL librarians are taking a stand is in regard to copyright in their individual nations.  I saw several presentations, from library consortia in Poland, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Zimbabwe, about how they had made their library consortia into recognized stakeholders in discussions of copyright reform on the national level.  One consortium is offering small grants for librarians to become advocates for fair copyright; another has established a copyright “help desk” to bring librarians up to speed.  One of the eIFL staff emphasized to me the importance of this copyright work.  Copyright advocacy is part of the solution, I was told, to the problem of burdensome licensing terms that have often been seen in those parts of the world.

One story was particularly interesting to me.  An African librarian told how publishers in her country often view libraries and librarians as a major “enemy” because it is believed that they encourage book piracy.  Through the consortium of academic libraries, librarians have now become actively involved in a major publishing event that is held annually in her country, and recently the libraries were asked to nominate a board member to that group.  As a result of these efforts, the relationship between librarians and publishers has improved, and there is much more understanding (thus less suspicion) about library goals and priorities.

eIFL librarians are also taking a stand amongst their own faculties by advocating for open access. There were multiple stories about new open access policies at different universities, and about the implementation of repository software.  There were also multiple presentations to convey the advantages that open resources offer to education.  These presentations discussed MOOCs (that was me), open data, alternative methods of research assessment and text-mining.  If these sound familiar, they should.  In spite of difficult conditions and low levels of resourcing, these librarians are investigating the same opportunities and addressing the same challenges as their U.S. counterparts.  Just to illustrate the breadth of the interest in the whole topic of openness, I wrote down the countries from which the librarians who grilled me about MOOCs came when I spent an hour fielding questions; they came from Azerbaijan, Lesotho, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Malawi, Maldives, Macedonia, Fiji, China, Thailand, Ghana, Belarus, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Swaziland and Mongolia.  They came with questions that challenged my assumptions (especially about business models) and deepened my own understanding of the international impact of open online courses.

There is one last conversation I had that I want to report on, both for its own sake and because of how it illuminates the eIFL mission.  Mark Patterson, the editor of the open access journal eLife, was at the GA to talk about research assessment.  Later I sat and talked with him about eLife.  He told me that the most exciting thing about eLife was its model whereby scientists reclaim the decision about what is important to science.  While the editors of subscription-based journals must always strive for novelty in order to defend and extend their competitiveness, eLife and, presumably, other open access journals, have scientists making decisions about what is important to science, whether or not it is shiny and new.  Sometimes there is an article that is really important because it refines some idea or process in a small way, or because of its didactic value.  Such articles would escape the notice of many subscription journals, but the editors at eLife can catch them and publish them.  And the reason this seems to fit so well into the eIFL context is because it is about self-determination.  Whether I was talking about open access journals with Mark or to the country delegates at the GA, this was the dominant theme, the need to put self-determination at the center of scholarly communications systems, from publishing to purchasing.

Copyright in the Classroom, Libraries, Scholarly Publishing

A line in the sand

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The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article about library outrage over the recent decision by Harvard Business Publishing to claw back some functionality for key Harvard Business Review articles that many libraries subscribe to on various EBSCO platforms, and to charge a separate licensing fee to recover that functionality.  I also will have an article dealing with this issue on the Library Journal Peer-to-Peer blog (to be published on Thursday). But I want to say one more thing about it.

Harvard Business Publishing is treating this as an issue between themselves and the institutions that subscribe to HBR via EBSCO.  They accuse faculty of using articles as course readings without paying the “required” extra fee, and are disabling the EBSCO versions to force that additional fee.  But this is a skewed perspective.  From the point of view of the subscribing institutions, what is happening is that they are getting less functionality from EBSCO and are now being asked to pay HBP to regain that function.

Properly viewed, I suggest, this is not a dispute between libraries, or faculties, and Harvard.  It is a dispute between Harvard Business Publications and EBSCO over how to divide up the pie.  And libraries should refuse to make the pie bigger just to settle that dispute.

To be clear, the functions that HPB says are being wrongly exploited — printing, downloading and persistent linking — have been a part of the EBSCO databases for years.  HBP would argue that their special licensing terms with EBSCO (which were impossible to convey to faculty, since they make no sense) have always forbidden classroom use.  But the truth is, these technological changes are intended to prevent faculty from even giving students a reference to an article and asking the students to read that article on their own.  HBP wants to recover a separate fee even for that.

So the demands made by HBP really do break the EBSCO database as it has been purchased for years.  If libraries are going to lose functionality they have been buying over that time, they must demand a reduction in the price that is paid to EBSCO.  What is remarkable in this case is that the value of the lost functionality is easily quantifiable; it is represented by the new licensing fee that HBP plans to charge.

This is what I mean by insisting that this is a dispute between EBSCO and Harvard.  Libraries should refuse to pay more significantly more for the same functionality, especially since that functionality is so central to what we buy journal aggregator databases for.  If we have to pay Harvard this license fee, basic fairness suggests that what we pay EBSCO be reduced by the same amount.  EBSCO has been strangely silent during this controversy.  But libraries should draw this line in the sand — we will spend no more than some reasonable percentage increase — a single digit percentage, certainly — over our current EBSCO subscription to get the same functions we had last year.  Harvard and EBSCO can discuss any changes in the way that money is split between them, but that is not our problem.  If Harvard wants $200,000 more from us, we must pay EBSCO $200,000 less.

Few librarians would dispute the proposition that we cannot keep paying massive increases to get the same publications and same capabilities that we had before.  It is unsustainable, and it is unfair.  This price increase, for that is what it is, is especially massive.  If Harvard Business Publications cannot make do with the revenue they have had for decades and suddenly needs millions more, that is a problem with how they run their business, not with what EBSCO subscribers expect to get, and have gotten for years, for their subscription dollars.  And they need to take that demand up with the platform provider, since it is that platform that they are insisting be broken.

Nevertheless, librarians have not been good at actually saying no.  This is the moment to strengthen our spines and refuse to pour more money into the fraught relationship between Harvard and EBSCO; we must let them settle the matter between themselves.  If we do not draw this line in the sand, we will continue to get that sand kicked in our faces.