Cornell & American Association of Publishers - Another View
It's true that Cornell issued new guidelines in response to an infringement complaint from American Association of Publishers. It's also true that AAP is extremely happy with Cornell's response to the complaint and are using news of Cornell's guidelines in many press releases and news stories in the hope that other schools will adopt the same sort of guidelines.
Academic and Library organizations are putting a different spin on the story. For example, The Library Journal posted Settlement? Cornell Issues New Gudielines on Electronic Reserves, in which Carrie Russell, American Library Association copyright specialist, cautions against using the Cornell guidelines as a national standard.
Cornell wasn't the first institution targeted by AAP; the organization made similar claims against the University of California San Diego in 2003. Because UCSD is a state institution, it was able to claim sovereign immunity from damages claimed under federal copyright law; as a private institution, Cornell could have faced a lawsuit had it not complied.
I am not ready to say that the Cornell case puts the question of using an LMS for e-reserves entirely to rest. I am comfortable with saying that an LMS can be used as a vehicle to deliver library e-reserves, but I think we need to be careful not to fall into AAP's conflation of coursepacks, e-reserves, and LMS content into one entity.
Perhaps this seems to be a trivial distinction, but we need to be careful about both our terminology and the uses we assign coursepack, e-reserve, and course content.
This is not to say that there isn't a need to have some sort of guidelines for the use of electronic materials, but I'd like to see guidelines (written without the threat of a lawsuit) come from a collaborative effort among publishers, libraries, and academia.
Comments
Thanks, Susan. I have brought this to our ERes staff to check against our current working guidelines.
Posted by: Linda | January 4, 2007 10:35 AM