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Licensing Resources

In the print world, when an individual or library acquires a copy of a work, copyright law sets out the rights to use it. Here are some examples of what the copyright holder, an owner and a user can each do with a book under copyright law:

If a book owner or borrower wants to use the book beyond the uses permitted by law, he or she must get permission. This scheme represents a careful balance between the rights of the copyright owner and the owner of the book.

It now seems likely that certain aspects of this scheme will change in the digital environment. So far, the changes seem to favor copyright owners and create more liabilities and fewer and more restrictive rights for users.

For example:

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act includes changes that support copyright owners' contention that the right to lend should not apply to digital works - there goes the entire underpinning of our U.S. library system regarding digital works.

• Recent court cases have suggested that whenever copyright owners can make it easier to ask for permission and pay fees, the scope of fair use in their works shrinks.

• The CONFU negotiations gave publishers an opportunity to describe in vivid detail what they believe the scope of fair use in digital works should be - and it is very narrow.

It is not hard to see the writing on the wall: If the academic community wants to browse, download, print out, forward, and quote from digital works, we had better secure those rights at the same time we acquire digital access. Those who negotiate the software and database licenses that will, in just a few years, significantly replace hard-copy acquisition, are determining today the rights we will have tomorrow. Our rights are going to be in the contract, not in the law, so we had better have a look at those contracts. Those contracts are the new copyright frontier.

The documents Copyright in the Library: Acquisition Under Contract, Developing a Comprehensive Copyright Policy and Licensing Electronic Resources (ARL Brochure) will help you to better understand these issues.

For hands on help, see Liblicense, Yale University Library's Resource for Librarians, and our U.T. System Software and Database License Checklist. Liblicense includes a very nice page of links to other resources addressing licensing issues. Lesley Ellen Harris publishes several excellent articles about licensing at her Website, copyrightlaws.com. There are now model standard licenses for use by publishers, librarians and subscription agents for electronic resources.