Tuesday, October 18, 2016

This double session begins with a lawyer who talks about how intellectual property law continues to struggle to adapt to the changing norms of a digital world. As information service providers and content gatekeepers, librarians are especially sensitive to this shifting legal landscape, and McElwain explores basic tenets of copyright law, including authorship, infringement, fair use, and contributory liability, as well as recent legal developments relevant to information professionals such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Stored Communications Act, and the Communications Decency Act. Weiss presents easy-to-digest info about dealing with rights and permissions for digital and online documents, lectures, and audio/video presentations; course management systems; YouTube; and even class recordings. Marvin addresses some case studies: Your new content on the institutional repository has launched. To make your yearbooks and course catalogs more easily accessible, the details and images were placed online. Students were asked to use a free website to post their art assignments using ArtStor. The student German Club posted images it found on the internet of popular places in Germany. Innocent intent or not, these are examples of when copyright was an afterthought. Faculty who are authors ask to have their items removed from the IR because the publisher disallows this. A student is upset that not only is her current address available in the yearbook, other companies are also offering access to this information for a fee. ArtStor contacted the institution’s copyright compliance officer to demand content be removed. The German Club gets a post from an attorney to pay $250 immediately. Get tips on how to avoid these kind of copyright challenges!