Universities and publishers are closely following a court case regarding the copyright policies of electronic course reserves — academic documents that have been catalogued online — that is awaiting trial in the U.S. Court of Appeals.
In 2008, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and SAGE Publications filed a lawsuit against Georgia State University. The plaintiffs allege that Georgia State violated copyright law by allowing some of the publishers’ content to be used in e-reserves without license.
Judge Orinda Dale Evans of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in favor of Georgia State in 2011, stating that the university only violated publishers’ copyrights by going over the amount of e-reserves considered fair use in five of 99 cases. The publishers, however, wanted another trial, and their motion for appeal has been granted.
Georgetown students encounter e-reserves, also known as online reserves, every day when professors post scanned articles on Blackboard.
According to Laura Leichum, intellectual property manager for the Georgetown University Press, there are varying regulations for e-reserve access.
“Usually, the rule is only people in that class can view the material,” said Laura Leichum, intellectual property manager for the Georgetown University Press.
The press publishes about 40 books and two journals a year that are primarily aimed at scholars, according to its website.
Mark Muehlhaeusler, head of the department of copyright and digital rights management for Georgetown University Library, does not believe the case will ultimately have much effect on academic practices at Georgetown.
“When the first judgment came down, we looked at it very carefully to see if there were [risks]. Georgetown is very careful, inherently risk-averse,” Muehlhaeusler said, adding that Georgetown makes use of e-reserves very differently than does Georgia State.
According to Muehlhaeusler, the university tries to use e-reserves sparingly and only for pertinent material whereas other schools may utilize the documents as often as possible.
Although the case may not greatly impact Georgetown, Evans’s ruling clarified that only ten percent of a book can legally be used in any reserve system.
“The case clarifies what is fair use [and] it makes it easier to make that determination on a day-to-day basis,” Muehlhaeusler said.
Both Leichum and Muehlhaeusler said they believe the publishers’ efforts to enforce copyright regulation is not only motivated by financial reasoning, but also by the desire to preserve academic integrity.
“Copyright is not there to protect the explicit interests of the publisher,” Muehlhaeusler said. “It’s [there] to stimulate creative expression,”
Ultimately, both educators and publishers want people to be able to access academic content.
“We’d like to have everyone use this material. There’s a common goal,” Leichum said.
