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Tina Ulrich

Ruling on copyright fair use will hurt professors, students and publishers (essay) @ins... - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...-students-and-publishers-essay

copyright ereserves fair use Georgia.State

shared by Tina Ulrich on 21 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The case revolves around a challenge by several companies that published non-textbook scholarly works to Georgia State University’s electronic reserve systems, wherein faculty and librarians would scan in excerpts of books for students to access digitally, a technological improvement over the traditional practice of leaving a copy or two on reserve at the library circulation desk. The publishers claimed mass copyright infringement while Georgia State cited the fair use provisions of Section 107 of the Copyright Law.
  • finding only five in violation out of the dozens submitted by the publishing companies
  • The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; The nature of the copyrighted work; The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • the law’s four factors for analysis:
  • often requires knowledge of unavailable facts (such as the effect on the market of the work, which is nearly impossible for those outside of the company to guess at).
  • these findings were for those works that could be purchased digitally.
  • Rejecting the 10 percent or one chapter bright-line rule, the appellate court wrote that “the District Court should have performed this analysis on a work-by-work basis, taking into account whether the amount taken -- qualitatively and quantitatively -- was reasonable in light of the pedagogical purpose of the use and the threat of market substitution.”
  • the decision is a poor one for those who look to the future. As content becomes more available in varying formats, and our faculty, staff and students are faced with myriad opportunities to pay for content, make fair use, or violate copyrights of authors and creators, the presence of clear standards and easily digestible rules provided higher education with a fighting chance to educate our academic community and encourage proper balancing and fair (but not inappropriate) use of content.
  • our instructors simply do not have the time to conduct an exhaustive analysis of each use, even if they did take the time to learn all the permutations of the fair use analysis. This isn’t to say that they can’t, but to state the reality that they won’t.
  • even those who steep themselves in the details of fair use can disagree on whether a certain use is fair or violative.
  • When intellectual property law experts cannot agree, we should not expect our history and math faculty to do justice to the fair use analysis each time. 
  • Instead, faculty will divide into two camps.  One group will “throw caution to the wind” and use whatever content they wish in whatever form they desire, hoping never to raise the ire of the publishing companies.  The other, out of an abundance of caution, will self-censor, and fail to make fair use of content for fear that they might step over a line they cannot possibly identify, and can never be certain of until a judge rules one way or the other.  Either way, our students and the publishers lose out.
  • Tina Ulrich on 21 Oct 14
     
    Inside Higher Ed blogger, Joseph Storch
Tina Ulrich

11th Circuit Rules On Georgia State Fair Use Case - Copyright Librarian - 0 views

blog.lib.umn.edu/...11th-circuit-gsu-ruling.html

copyright ereserves fair use Georgia.State

shared by Tina Ulrich on 21 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The court extensively discusses the public purpose of copyright law. Section B of the opinion (page 46-55) is a masterfully written, quite clear overview of the theoretical underpinnings of U.S. copyright law in general, and of fair use in particular. (I think it's a bit weaker in the second half, but pages 46-50 are really darn good reading.)
  • The idea that creator remuneration is -secondary- to the actual purpose of copyright law is often left out of a lot of related public discourse.
  • the court affirms that "[t]he fair use doctrine also critically limits the scope of the monopoly granted to authors under the Copyright Act in order to promote the public benefit copyright is intended to achieve." 
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • "Congress devoted extensive effort to ensure that fair use would allow for educational copying under the proper circumstances
  • The court disapproved of Judge Evans' blanket 10%-or-one-chapter rule.
  • In addition to rejecting the applicability of the Classroom Copying Guidelines, the court also rejected the coursepack copying cases as binding authority,
  • The court soundly rejects the idea that excerpts from books substitute for sales of the -actual books-.
  • this discussion completely fails to acknowledge the many other incentives creators have for creating.
  • The other thing that bothers me about the focus on economic incentives is that market models don't actually reflect reality.
  • The court affirmed that course readings are not transformative use.
  • The court observed that industry "best practices" are "not relevant to individualized fair use analysis". That could be a bad thing, because sometimes industry practices are all we have to go on to determine fair use. But it was a fairly glossed-over discussion, and they may have meant just that individual circumstances of a specific use case are more important than overall best practices...
  • the uses in question are highly likely to be market-substitutions, and thus that the market harm factor is especially important.
  • By placing additional weight on market harm - a factor about which end users have almost no information - the court is creating major difficulties for end users. It would be hard, but not impossible, for many instructors to find out if a license is available. It's really quite out of the question for individual instructors to correctly hypothesize -future- directions of the market...
  • broad-scale problem with current copyright laws. They were drafted for a time when, in order to commit infringement on a scale that was noticeable by copyright holders, one more or less had to have some level of industrial-scale resources.
  • In the meantime, it may also be worth remembering that none of this legal interpretation is binding law outside of the 11th Circuit (Alabama, Florida, Georgia.) In other states, we can look to these opinions for guidance, but we can also explore different paths.
Tina Ulrich

New Study: The Profitability of Copyright-Intensive Industries » infojustice - 5 views

infojustice.org/29916

publishers textbooks profit jh mh

shared by Tina Ulrich on 20 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • the copyright-intensive industries’ profit margins on average grew by 3.98%, while the other industries’ profit margins on average decreased by 0.75%. The high level of profitability of the copyright-intensive industries suggests that the copyright system serves these industries effectively, and that they are not in need of special government assistance in the form of new legislation or law enforcement resources.
  • Tina Ulrich on 20 Jan 14
     
    Study showing that textbook publishers are making record profits/ 9/12/14 This website is down. The info about the study is included in this article: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130618/01001823516/copyright-intensive-firms-are-excessively-profitable.shtml
Tina Ulrich

ALA and ACRL responds to Eleventh Circuit Court's encouraging "fair use" decision in Ge... - 0 views

www.districtdispatch.org/...-georgia-state-university-case

copyright ereserves fair use Georgia.State ala

shared by Tina Ulrich on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Although publishers sought to bar the uncompensated excerpting of copyrighted material for “e-reserves,” the court rejected all such arguments and provided new guidance in the Eleventh Circuit for how “fair use” determinations by educators and librarians should best be made. Remanding to the lower court for further proceedings, the court ruled that fair use decisions should be based on a flexible, case-by-case analysis of the four factors of fair use rather than rigid “checklists” or “percentage-based” formulae.
  • thoughtful analysis of fair use and a rejection of highly restrictive fair use guidelines promoted by many publishers.
  • The court agreed that the non-profit educational nature of the e-reserves service is inherently fair, and that that teachers’ and students’ needs should be the real measure of any limits on fair use, not any rigid mathematical model.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • acknowledged that educators’ use of copyrighted material would be unlikely to harm publishers financially when schools aren’t offered the chance to license excerpts of copyrighted work.
Tina Ulrich

On Cambridge v. Patton | Law, Policy -- and IT? @insidehighered - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...cambridge-v-patton

copyright ereserves fair use Georgia.State

shared by Tina Ulrich on 21 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Not for profit organizations in general – charitable organizations, organized religion and education – get tax breaks because they are in service not of individual profit in the bold capitalist tradition of American business and upward mobility but for the society at large. 
  • Since about the election of Nixon, the United States, fueled by corporate interests, has moved not in an exact straight line but in an overall progressive march away from notions of community and service ever-increasingly toward individual rights, albeit largely organized in the form of the for-profit corporations.
  • you may not be familiar with the costs of scholarly publishing.  Almost unique to higher education, these costs not only cripple the institutions – given the needs of academic libraries to serve the institution’s missions – but also the students, who have been socialized to pay exorbitant rates for textbooks and other academic published materials.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • higher education MUST reform itself on this matter. 
  • Take a look at the extraordinary expansive scope, terms and damages of copyright before micromanaging fair use.  And give not-for-profit higher education more weight on the scales of copyright justice.
Tina Ulrich

On the Relationship Between OER Adoption Initiatives and Libraries - 1 views

opencontent.org/...3883

libraries

shared by Tina Ulrich on 26 May 15 - No Cached
  • can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources? The answer to this question is no, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect.
  • In summary, in circumstances where (1) the primary object of study is not an idea, but is a specific creative work which is still under copyright and (2) the copyright holder has chosen not to publish the work under an open license, it is literally impossible to replace all the commercial content in that course with OER.
  • The library may be able to purchase or license copies of these commercial materials and make them available to students for free. In fact, they may have already purchased or licensed copies which are just waiting to be used. The library is a trusted, capable, and unfortunately often overlooked potential partner for closing the access gap to commercial materials. (Your library may also be curating OER you don’t know about – libraries are actually leading the charge toward OER on some campuses.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • From the perspectives of affordability and pedagogical flexibility, when faculty make course materials adoption decisions they should chose OER first, all other things being equal. When it is impossible to choose OER, faculty should choose library resources. Students should be required to individually purchase commercial materials only when OER and library resources are impossible to use.
  • This process begins by making a special effort to resist the temptation to throw our hands up and retreat back to commercial materials when we realize one of our learning outcomes is in the “not yet” zone.
  • Tina Ulrich on 26 May 15
     
    David Wiley blogpost
Tina Ulrich

Only 1 in 5 Students Obtain All Learning Materials Legally -- Campus Technology - 1 views

campustechnology.com/...earning-materials-legally.aspx

copyright

shared by Tina Ulrich on 15 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Tina Ulrich on 15 Apr 16
     
    Research A new study on student piracy makes a convincing case for open educational resources in higher education. Students in higher education today are living in the era of the $400 college textbook, and many have had to find creative, more affordable ways to obtain textbooks.
Tina Ulrich

What is a Creative Commons License? - 2 views

webmag.co/creative-commons-license

creative commons license copyright infographics jh mh

shared by Tina Ulrich on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Tina Ulrich on 30 Jun 14
     
    infographic describing various levels of CC license
Joelle Hannert

Opening up education through innovation | Open Education Europa - 0 views

openeducationeuropa.eu

repository

shared by Joelle Hannert on 21 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Joelle Hannert on 21 Sep 15
     
    Reviewed in Choice, August 2015: Open Education Europa, from the European Commission. http://openeducationeuropa.eu/ [Visited May'15] Open Education Europa offers a single gateway to more than 170 MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) offerings, nearly 800 courses, and a wealth of freely accessible educational resources in the European Union. The project grew out of the EU-supported Opening up Education Initiative calling for more innovative teaching, new technologies, and open-access learning options for EU citizens. Information is delivered in a simple, easy-to-use manner via the content areas displayed across the tops of pages and a giant search bar below the display; advanced searching reveals the website's total number of results under each filter type. Though the main content of the site is in English, the search bar and browsing buttons can be set to the languages of the EU via a drop-down menu. Browsing through content is simple, with filters set to refine by content type (e.g., MOOCs, courses, articles, events) and help differentiate areas of study by subject or level of materials, language, and special features of the materials (e.g., video lectures, forum, assessment tools). There is also an option to filter content that requires prerequisite courses or experience. The search results are set out much like an online-shopping site-sortable by posting date, alphabetically by title, or relevance. Returns can be hit-or-miss, however, with some filters failing to restrict specific content, e.g., retrieving Spanish and German materials even after setting the English-language filter or returning the same results in different languages. Though the browsing and search algorithms might require a bit more fine-tuning, the creators have designed a handy aggregator that should help increase access to new and innovative educational content for all EU citizens. Open Education Europa is also a convenient way for US citizens, students, or faculty to discover
Tina Ulrich

LCA Files Brief on Behalf of Georgia State - District Dispatch - 1 views

www.districtdispatch.org/...ief-on-behalf-of-georgia-state

copyright ereserves fair use Georgia.State

shared by Tina Ulrich on 22 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • LCA argues that GSU’s e-reserves policy represents the widespread and well-established best practices of fair use that includes limitations to ensure that the use of course materials is fair. 
  • This was a notable victory for educational institutions and libraries as the court clearly understood that current teaching practices were reasonable and fair.  As expected the publishers appealed, arguing that the ruling is not only a “threat to the core of academic publishing”, it re-interprets fair use far too broadly.
Tina Ulrich

Free e-Textbooks - 1 views

www4.csudh.edu/...index

copyright ereserves fair use ebrary textbooks

shared by Tina Ulrich on 29 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Tina Ulrich on 29 Oct 14
     
    California State Dominguez Hills using ebooks as texts.
Tina Ulrich

http://www.arl.org/storage/documents/publications/code-of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf - 1 views

www.arl.org/...of-best-practices-fair-use.pdf

copyright fair use libraries ARL

shared by Tina Ulrich on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Tina Ulrich on 29 Jul 14
     
    Association of Research Libraries "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries"
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