Copyright Law for Librarians and Educators: Creative Strategies and Practical Solutions (review)

Kenneth Crews has taken a new look at his successful guide, Copyright Essentials for Librarians and Educators(Chicago: American Library Association, 2000); and, in doing so, he has delivered another highly accessible handbook that reflects his continuing curiosity about the boundaries of evolving copyright law. Targeted to the principal players in the world of instruction and higher education, the second edition offers novice and grizzled veteran alike succinct explications and provocative interpretations of the law as applied by courts and as practiced by those of us who wish to avoid appearing before a judge. This edition, a wholly new work devised to address responsibilities brought about by the rapidly changing technology of education, is a valuable tool for anyone concerned with understanding how original works of authorship are protected by law and, at the same time, available to be used by others. Professor Crews, director of the Center for Intellectual Property and Innovation at the Indiana University School of Law–Indianapolis, is widely known in academic copyright circles for his commitment to responsible copyright behavior among educators and information professionals. He seeks to provide a resource for anyone to understand the rules of copyright in order to meet the challenge to balance the competing interests of authors and other producers who own copyrights with the interests, needs, and rights of lawful users of copyrighted works. With the publication of this new edition, Crews brings currency and fresh ideas to the expanding discourse in U.S. culture regarding the role copyright law plays in fostering or hindering access to knowledge and information.

The conundrum of fair use, that little statute that generates big controversies, lies in identifying the limits of fair use when all of those limits are not embodied in the statute itself. This conundrum is at the heart of many struggles with copyright law in the academy. In the wrestling match we engage in to balance the interests of users with those of rights owners, each side is armed with the Copyright Act of 1976. Crews handily takes on the conundrum and the need to explain the law. He sets fair use in the context of the law's intended purposes, leading the reader by stages from the reach of the law and the rights of ownership to an understanding that there are limits in either side's arsenal. In recognizing those limits, the reader begins to appreciate a central theme in this book—the limits we seek to understand in applications of fair use are bound to and interact with the law's many other limitations on exclusive rights. In turn, any of these limitations can present opportunities to control copyright's impact on our work when we understand how to carry out the responsibilities that accompany them. Indeed, Crews notes that after the law delivers its exclusive rights to copyright owners, the next 16 sections of the law set forth an array of exceptions and limits. Several are critical to the education enterprise. In this book Crews makes it clear that without them, and an informed user community to take advantage of them, copyright law might fail to meet one of its intended purposes, its Constitutional purpose—the promotion and progress of science and learning.

Inside 17 short chapters, Crews introduces the reader to a progression of copyright law's practical matters: what is protected, what is not, the complexity of durations, the subtleties of authorship, and the exclusive rights of ownership. He tackles the nuance of exceptions and limitations starting with the granddaddy of them all—fair use and its four factors. He presents explications of the major copyright exceptions educators rely on: Fair Use§107, Library Exceptions§108, Displays and Performances in Face-to-Face Teaching§110(1), and the TEACH Act— Displays and Performances in Distance Education§110(2). The reader will discover new treatment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act( DMCA) and its anti-circumvention provisions, elucidated...