The Kirtsaeng Decision: Copyright, Logic, and Libraries

March 20, 2013

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down a major copyright decision (Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons) that tells much about the future of books, the logic of the law, and the pressures of international trade agreements.  It all began with a graduate student from Thailand seeking to pay the high cost of an American [...]

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Georgia State and Fair Use: Copyright on Appeal

January 22, 2013

Several months have passed since the federal district court in Atlanta ruled in Cambridge University Press v. Becker that copying book excerpts for electronic reserves at Georgia State University (GSU) is within fair use.  Following a series of important procedural moves, the case is now set for appeal to the 11th Circuit.  As the parties [...]

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MOOCs, Distance Education, and Copyright: Two Wrong Questions to Ask

November 9, 2012

The rapid rise of MOOCs has rejuvenated conversations about copyright and the development of distance education programs.  Copyright long has been a challenge for distance learning, and the vast scale of MOOCs escalates the importance of addressing the law in a most thoughtful and creative manner.  Hundreds of thousands of students are now enrolling in [...]

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Court Rules on HathiTrust and Fair Use

October 11, 2012

Update on November 8, 2012: The Authors Guild and other plaintiffs have filed their notice of appeal of the decision with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  Watch for further developments. In September 2011 a group of authors, with The Authors Guild and other associations, filed a lawsuit against HathiTrust, five major [...]

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Copyright Q&A: Great Questions from a Reader

August 30, 2012

Philip Bolton, Jr. is the ETD Coordinator at Florida International University Graduate School.  He is an avid student of copyright, and he lunged into the Third Edition my book when it hit the market this year, and he has been a great Twitter correspondent ever since.  This week he posed a few lingering questions after [...]

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Fair Use Conference at Columbia University: Archived from March 2012

August 24, 2012

The following post offers information and links about an exciting conference on fair use held at Columbia University in March 2012.  The full video is available online.  While many conferences have addressed copyright and fair use, this one focused on the process of making fair use decisions inside universities, libraries, and other organizations.  The presenters [...]

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A Fresh Look at the Fair Use Checklist

March 23, 2012

The following essay is scheduled for publication in: The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter, Issue 1, 2012 Volume. For more information, see: http://www.copyrightlaws.com/the-copyright-new-media-law-newsletter/   A Fresh Look at the Fair Use Checklist By Kenneth D. Crews This work is licensed under the Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. The meaning of fair use [...]

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Preparing for Your Copyright Final Exam

December 8, 2011

Of all the labels I might receive, the professional title I like best is “educator.” One of my goals in developing the website of the Copyright Advisory Office is to educate readers about copyright. I come from the school of thought that if you teach someone well, they will be equipped for the next challenge. [...]

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HathiTrust and the Litigation Path

October 3, 2011

When parties file a lawsuit and send their case into the court system, predictions are almost always wrong, if not reckless.  Yet litigation is a matter of strategic planning that demands predictions.  Predictions are also a tempting parlor game, so let’s indulge a bit.  Earlier this month, The Author’s Guild and several individually named authors [...]

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Authors, Copyright, and HathiTrust

September 13, 2011

On September 12 of this year The Authors Guild, Inc. and other societies and individual authors filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against HathiTrust and five universities over making, storing, and providing access to scans of digital books.  HathiTrust may be well known among library professionals, but this lawsuit is certain to draw considerable new attention [...]

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