Reading the CONTU guidelines regarding photocopying for ILL purposes actually gave me some new ideas for my group's scenario from class on Friday. I am in the group debating whether it is allowed under copyright for a library to stop subscribing to a journal and rely on obtaining its content from Interlibrary Loans. According to the guidelines, the library should buy the journal if it requests "within any calendar year for a total of six or more copies of an article or articles published in such periodical within five years prior to the date of the request." Our scenario only stated that the amount of use was "moderate" and did not state whether the articles used were over five years old or not. Considering these guidelines, I now feel that the library should keep detailed track of how often the journal is used and what articles are referenced before deciding whether to stop their subscription.
Since Professor Anuj Desai will be coming to class on Friday, I have spent some time thinking of questions regarding the ProCD vs. Zeidenberg court case. First I would like to know a very obvious question - how was the case actually ruled? Does Professor Desai feel that this was a fair ruling or perhaps influenced by the fact that ProCD was most likely much larger than Zeidenberg's company, Silken Mountain Web Services, and, consequently, was able to contribute more monetarily to the trial? Second, is the real problem here the commercial use of a consumer version of ProCD's product? Would ProCD be happy with a ruling that required Zeidenberg to buy the commercial version and allowed his company to continue to resell the information in ProCD's database?
Moving on to Harris' text, before even getting to chapter one, I noticed something interesting. The copyright page does not state the usual warning: "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior permission of the publisher." According to Russell, this statement is false because reproduction and fair use exemptions still apply. Instead, Harris' book states a much more accurate description of its copyright: "All rights reserved except those which may be granted by Sections 107 and 108 of the Copyright Revision Act of 1976."
Reading the actual assigned chapters, one aspect of license agreements that I had not considered is that libraries can be content owners and may need to use license agreements to let others use their content rather than only using the agreements to obtain content. This makes a lot of sense because some libraries function as the archives for their town. For example, in This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson, the public library of Deadwood, South Dakota holds the archive of rare books and genealogical records for Deadwood dating back to the 1800s.
Lastly, I am in strong support of Litman's proposal for copyright revision after finishing Digital Copyright. Her basic idea is to recast "copyright as an exclusive right of commercial exploitation" rather than basing copyright on control over copies of a work. The definition of a copy of a work is increasingly difficult to determine with today's technology. This new principle would simplify copyright by removing the confusing mix of rights and exceptions so that the public can understand and follow it. For example, at my undergraduate school, our Film Society was paid to report on campus groups breaking copyright law by advertising a particular movie or TV show they were showing at an event. According to a strange exception in copyright law, a group would be allowed to advertise the viewing of "a popular British romantic comedy" but not state Love Actually on their fliers. Basing copyright law on commercial rights would remove illogical exceptions such as this one and, instead, perhaps require the group to pay a small fee for publicly showing the movie or require no fee at all since attendees would be more likely to buy the movie after viewing and enjoying it once anyway.
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