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QUESTION: Copyright & Fair Use

Submitted by Anonymooose on Tue, 11/25/2008 - 11:38am
question / pregunta: 

Greetings radical librarians: I am part of an organization developing an online syllabus for study groups we hope to be launching in 2009. We hope to be using articles from academic journals (and most likely obtained from J-STOR and Project Muse). Since we're posting this syllabus online, are there any issues of copyright that we should be worried about?

My gut feeling is that since we're not conducting these study groups with any kind of fee$, that we're in the realm of fair use, but i'd like a more informed opinion than my gut. Help me out, please!

Answers

Answer posted by: jenna

Per Laura Quilter, Esq., fair use attorney and librarian:

"The answer is that it is very fact-dependent, and I can't assess it just from the facts given -- e.g., 'part of an organization.'

"The TEACH Act (17 USC 108) protects use of materials in online teaching, but it's quite cabined in by various restrictions. If that explicit statutory exemption doesn't work, then it goes to fair use (17 USC 107), and of course that will depend on the various factors.

"The 'safest' course in a short-term sense is to provide only the citations. However, it is not necessarily the 'safest' course in terms of thinking about librarians' responsibilities to fully use legal rights on behalf of our patrons. The practical middle course is to password-protect the materials, which prevents unauthorized access by would-be infringers and by would-be infringement investigators."

Feel free to contact Laura directly (via the email address provided on her site or via Fb).