From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Council's Report on Copyright (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 08:47:00 -0600
Council's Report on Copyright Discusses Issues Without Settling Any
By WENDY R. LEIBOWITZ
The right of reproduction was debated Wednesday in a briefing at the
National Research Council. But the discussion was not about abortion -- it
was about copyright.
The occasion was the release of a report by the council, "Digital Dilemma:
Intellectual Property in the Information Age." The document spotlights the
different perspectives on copyright among scholars, publishers, lawyers, and
representatives of the technology industry.
The report -- almost two years in the writing -- was intended to bring
together different points of view, said Randall Davis, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is chairman of the Committee on
Intellectual Property Rights and the Emerging Information Infrastructure,
which issued the findings. "The report sets a foundation and a framework to
think out the problems of intellectual property in the digital age across
disciplines," he said.
But the report comes a full year after Congress's decision to extend the
term of copyright, and it does not discuss copyright-related issues in
data-base legislation that is now being considered. Some of those in the
audience who follow copyright closely said they were disappointed by the
report's repeated calls for additional study of contentious issues.
Perhaps the most striking portion of the report, copyright experts said, was
a question posed in its final pages: "Is 'copy' still the appropriate
foundational concept for copyright law in the digital age?"
The committee suggests that where digital information is concerned,
legitimate copies are made so routinely -- not to mention that
non-infringing copies are made in many formats for archival and back-up
purposes -- that the mere act of copying tells a regulator little about the
"legitimacy of the behavior."
In a digital world, the committee said, a new framework may be needed within
copyright law to determine not whether a copy has been made, but whether the
use of a work is consistent with the author's creative incentive.
"That is a very exciting question," said Scott Bennett, a librarian at Yale
University, who said he enjoyed reading the report. "Perhaps the right to
control reproduction may not be the best way to protect rights themselves in
the digital age."
Mr. Davis, the committee's chairman, emphasized that the committee was not
recommending "throwing rights out the door," but just asking whether there
was a better way to think about copyrights in the digital age.
Currently, he said, economists, lawyers, private and public librarians,
academics, information scientists, members of the publishing and
entertainment worlds, and high-tech industrialists discuss copyright
separately, taking narrow views of issues that affect everyone.
The 18 members of the committee represent institutions as diverse as Wired
magazine and the Queens Borough Public Library. The report notes many areas
of disagreement. There was "a very spirited discussion" whenever the group
met, said Karen Hunter, senior vice-president of Reed Elsevier Science, Inc.
The report suggests using new business models to manage some
intellectual-property issues. Some models are already proliferating on line:
Some scholarly material and some software-demonstration programs are freely
distributed. Site licenses protect material used repeatedly by libraries and
universities. Also popular are modest payments for each electronic use of
material or for time spent using a particular resource. Other models combine
advertising and subscription revenue with per-item or time-based usage fees.
The report discusses a number of other issues, including the difficulty of
distinguishing illegal copying from extensive copying for personal use. But
on this issue, as with many others, the report merely calls for further
study.
A summary of the report is currently available on line
(http://www.national-academies.org/). The full text is expected to be
available on line later this week.
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Copyright 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education