Copyright for Scholars
Most scholars have some experience with copyright — we’ve had to ask for permission to include others’ works in our publications, we’ve probably been turned down a time or two when we needed rights, we’ve assigned copyrights to our publishers, maybe some of us have even registered a copyright in a work that we hoped to commercialize. These are typical experiences that creators of content have in the course of being creative. But there are many other ways copyright affects our lives as academics, some of which are not so direct and obvious. We rely on fair use when we provide handouts to our students, for example, or when we include a colleague’s charts and graphs in a poster presentation or lecture. We could probably rely on fair use in many other circumstances too, if we knew more about it and its purpose and scope.
But let’s start at the beginning, with copyright’s purpose: Copyright’s purpose is to increase knowledge and it does that by creating an incentive for authors to create. The law gives creators a period of time during which only they may exploit the commercial value of their work. During this “term of protection,” the work’s owner is able to sell the work or otherwise charge for access to it, and in theory, the resulting revenues support continuing creativity. But as with any government-created set of rights, copyright both enables and disables. It has benefits and costs. If all goes well, the benefits and the costs of a government granted, time-limited monopoly balance each other, and overall, we achieve the stated goal of the grant of rights. For copyright, that goal woul be a net increase in the amount of creative output over what would have been achieved without the government grant of rights. But if things get out of balance, the monopoly can discourage creativity, dampen competition, and undermine the achievement of its own goals.
So how is copyright law working today? Balanced? Overall achieving its goals? There’s quite a debate about that very question. If it seems out of whack to you, you’re not alone. Ironically, if the law fails to keep up with the kinds of dramatic changes the Internet has caused in the creation, distribution and preservation of creative works, it risks becoming, little by little, irrelevant. People ignore it; businesses stop relying on it; they find other ways of producing revenue from creativity besides controlling sales of or access to their works. We are seeing just such a dynamic at work today in emerging business models in nearly every content industry. Copyright law risks slipping into the background noise — not totally irrelevant, but becoming less and less so.
Does this mean we can ignore the law? No, it does not. Far more copyright owners still depend on copyright to enable commercial exploitation of their works than those who are moving on to other ways of making a living from creativity. But these changes do mean that all of us need to be more conscious of the forces that affect our creativity, of what enables it and what stands in its way. Then we must act with respect to our own works and our uses of others’ works to solve, rather than perpetuate, some of the problems created by a bloated copyright monopoly.
What does that mean, you ask? Simple: know your rights; know when you need them and when you don’t. For example, in the case of copyright protection for your own works, pass on to your audience the rights you don’t need, allowing your works’ readers a more generous ability to read, use and enjoy your work than the law’s default provisions allow. It’s sort of a golden rule for academic publishing — give to others the kinds of rights you’d like them to give to you. Be explicit about it, for example, by tagging your work with a Creative Commons license. Another example involves fair use. Know when you can rely on it and when you should get permission to use others’ works. We’ve all got to be smarter about copyright.
The University of Texas at Austin Libraries provides access to the Copyright Crash Course to provide guidance on copyright issues. Further, if you have questions about copyright, feel free to contact the Libraries’ Scholarly Communications Advisor, Georgia Harper. The Crash Course is undergoing an update this summer and version 2.0 will be published in the fall, 2007. Until then, please use the original Crash Course, and the Crash Course Tutorial. Feel free to forward any suggestions about the Crash Course you might have to Georgia Harper. She’ll be happy to hear from you.
