Copyright Roundup: ACRL 2013 and in the Library Classroom

Recently I’ve been thinking about copyright and fair use, and specifically what we are telling students about these increasingly important matters. I think a lot of times we shy away from talking to students about copyright, because we are worried about giving them legal advice or because we assume that they don’t care and won’t listen. However, I think it is really important to talk to students about copyright, because we want them to be responsible users of copyrighted materials and responsible owners of copyrighted materials. If we don’t talk to them about the important social and economic issues around knowledge creation and production, where will they get their ideas about copyright from? The people who are talking the most vocally about it: big media conglomerates who have an interest in protecting their intellectual property at all costs. And if we don’t teach our students about fair use? Probably no one else will.

Flickr user: opensourceway

At ACRL 2013 this past month, I attended a session of three conference paper presentations that all had something to do with copyright. Jean Dryden discussed how online archives struggle with how to educate their users about copyright, and ultimately often fail to do so. I think we (librarians and other information professionals) should be taking every opportunity to talk to our users about these issues, especially in the case of archives, where we are the copyright holders or at least stewards of those copyrights. 

In the same session, James Neal, described the challenges and dangers we face on the intellectual property landscape. Corporate media interests and lobbyists are exerting pressure in Washington, D.C. for copyright reform in their favor, and the new director of the U.S. copyright office is indicating that she is looking for a new set of major copyright reforms. The Supreme Court and other courts have recently taken on a number of cases around copyright and intellectual property. Digital rights management is ever encroaching on our ability to own and use copyrighted materials. What have we been doing to be a part of or even a lead in these conversations? Neal pointed out that when professional bodies create ‘best practices’ they often undermine risk taking. In my favorite line of his talk, Neal reminded us, “Fair use is not civil disobedience; it is our most important tool and must be preserved.” 

Katie Fortney actually provided a great example of how we can use and protect fair use in her talk describing the creation of the Grateful Dead digital archive. She described how they triaged the items going into the collection, deciding if and how they would try to get permission from the copyright holders. For the 23,000 items that they posted under the presumption of fair use, they have received only 15 takedown notices and no claims of copyright infringement. Fortney said that it is misguided to allow fears about copyright guide our decisions about what to put into digital collections—we should be trying to make the best and most useful collections and we can use fair use to do so.

So what does this mean for reference and instruction librarians? I find that opportunities to talk about copyright and fair use come up all the time, and it is pretty easy to slip in some quick information about copyright. When students want to search for images, I send them to Flickr and show the advanced search options for Creative Commons licensed materials. When I cover citations in instruction sessions, I bring in the concept of fair use. (Kevin Smith this week laid out the three questions he tells students (and faculty) to ask themselves when considering fair use: “First, will the “quotation” of the original help me make my point?  Second, will it help my reader/viewer get the point?  Finally, did I use no more than necessary to make my point?”) In fact, I’ve had very engaged discussions with first year students on these topics, because these students have all run up against DRM when downloading or streaming music and videos online. This is a great way to talk about ownership and knowledge production, and to highlight the different norms in different communities. This is precisely the kind of information literacy I want my students to have because it so clearly translates from their academic selfs to their social and professional selfs. 

As I asked above, if we don’t talk to them about these things, who will?

The e-books is dead! Long live the e-book!

Photo credit: cehwiedel

As quick as we are to declare the death of print and the ascendancy of the e-book, it seems that we are quicker to rush to the gallows of the e-book the moment sales begin to falter.  Or at least that's what I got from Nicholas Carr's most recent review of the state of e-books: "Don't Burn Your Books--Print Is Here to Stay." 

Carr takes a look at some of the recent Pew surveys about e-reading habits, and sales figures for popular e-readers and concludes that readers have decided their Kindles are only good for hiding copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, and that really they'd rather be playing video games on their tablets, or guiltily sniffing the ink between two hard covers of a Pulitzer Prize winner.

While he's not totally wrong, I think that his arguments largely miss the point of why we should care about whether people read a digital or a print text. What's worse, his article reeks of a snobbery that is frankly unhelpful when we talk about the reading public.  Really, what we should be concerned about is not how folks are consuming texts, or whether they're reading the "right" texts--but whether folks are reading at all, and getting anything out of what they read (be that information, titillation, enlightenment, connection, empathy, or thrills).

Based on the sales of genre fiction versus literary fiction and non-fiction, Carr points out something that several Bookaneers presented on and blogged about back in 2010 (please don't watch the video of our conference presentation, because it's embarrassing, just know that it's there): that we read differently for different purposes, and that reading for information and reading for narrative require different technologies (see also Freeda's post about ideal e-books for academic reading).

While Carr chalks up the popularity of genre fiction in e-book format to the shame that he expects readers to feel about "the kind of light entertainments that have traditionally been sold in supermarkets and airports," I would attribute it instead to the addictiveness of  the only novels that most people are reading.  Romance novel addicts will tell you that they read them as fast as they can get them, and if the Amazon marketplace is closer than the supermarket, then they're going to read even more, even faster. Furthermore, even if readers wanted to read things like, say, textbooks on their e-readers, they can't, because the makers of both e-readers and e-books have utterly failed to adapt their technologies to anything other than linear, narrative reading.

There is a consistent conflation in Carr's piece between e-readers and e-books, and it makes for a muddied analysis.  It makes perfect sense to me that e-readers will disappear as single-use technologies when tablets have become their equal in portability and readability and their superior in versatility.  But just because we're not buying Kindles anymore that doesn't mean that we will be reading any fewer digital texts, or any more print texts.

True, paper books are a real pleasure to read.  The codex, as a technology, has had hundreds of years to adapt perfectly to our hands; our eyes; and the way that our brains access, interpret, and recall information.  There are many good reasons why we should keep reading books in print, but until we face the fact that digital texts will coexist with, and perhaps supplant printed texts, we can't focus our energy on what really matters: getting texts (digital or print) that suit our reading habits and needs.  Who cares whether e-reader manufacturers are making or losing money on our reading (because that's what these past 5 years of e-reader boosterism really comes down to, right?)?  What we should care about is getting high-quality, abundant, low-cost, accessible reading materials into our own hands and the hands of our students.

Doctorow's First Law

I know we've all been thinking a lot about copyright and its changing meaning in relation to digital texts. I think most of us have been thinking about it in terms of readers versus content providers, where readers' rights and relationship to the text are being diminished as content providers exert increasing control over the words of others.

Cory Doctorow provides an interesting fleshing-out of this struggle from an author's point of view in Doctorow's First Law.

In anticipation of the release of his new book, Doctorow has sought out publishers and content providers who will support his effort to release his work DRM-free. This is his second attempt, and after the frustrations of his first attempt, he came up with Doctorow's First Law: "Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, and won't give you a key, they're not doing it for your benefit."

Read his post to find out what happened the second time around, and to get details on the ruling a few weeks ago that made exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.