Copyright Questions and Answers for Information Professionals: From the Columns of Against the Grain by Laura N. Gasaway (review)

The title of this book describes exactly what it does and how it originated. Laura Gasaway, whose background as both librarian and law professor makes her uniquely qualified to be the author of such a book, has been answering questions submitted by readers of Against the Grain (a journal that was started as a companion to the annual Charleston Conference run for over thirty years by Katina Strauch, who provides a Foreword to this book) for more than fifteen years. This book is a compilation of readers’ questions and her answers organized by topic, briefly introduced with her contextual commentary and supplemented by a well-prepared nineteen-page index.

As the author herself advises, the book can be read straight through, or it can simply be used sporadically as a reference whenever the reader confronts a copyright conundrum beyond the reader’s ability to resolve without some guidance from an expert. To make the book work best as a reference, the answers provided are more or less self-contained so that the reader seldom needs to consult another Q&A in order to feel properly guided. This is a strength of the book but also a weakness, as it results in repetition of some information, which makes the book somewhat less enjoyable as a work to read from cover to cover. However, given the necessity of compromise here, the author has chosen the right balance between utility and readability.

No book written about an area of the law as contentious as copyright is going to have all readers agree with the author at every point, but for this reviewer there was very little to disagree with. On a few occasions, the book might have benefited from some additional explanation. For example, in the answer to Q55 about reproducing advertisements in a scholarly work for critique and comment, it might have been helpful to refer not only to fair use but also to copyright notice because, as Nimmer on Copyright makes clear, advertisements have been treated differently in this respect from other contributions to collective works. For works published under provisions of the 1909 Copyright Act, ‘unless a separate copyright notice were placed on the advertisement in the name of the advertiser, the advertisement would be injected into the public domain upon its original publication.’¹ This rule also applies to works published after 1978, when the 1976 Act came into effect, until copyright notice was eliminated as a condition of copyright protection when the law was amended in 1989 after the United States adhered to the Berne Convention. So, any advertisement lacking such a notice up to 1989 would be free to use without worrying about fair use at all.

Among other minor sins of omission, I would include the following. In answering Q95 regarding a library’s providing temporary access to online databases for students who are not enrolled at the university, the author might have addressed the situation of visiting faculty and what library privileges they typically have, if any. Q321 asks about who should be on a committee tasked with developing a campus copyright policy. While rightly urging that such a committee should have members representing the interests of faculty, librarians, staff (including legal), and even students, Gasaway misses the opportunity to mention university presses for those one hundred or so US institutions that have a press. Besides librarians, press staff are probably more knowledgeable about copyright issues than anyone else on campus, even including general counsel, who are seldom experts on copyright and more likely to be well versed in patent law if they have expertise in intellectual property at all. In discussing the implications of what Aaron Swartz...