An introduction to copyright issues for WWW publishers at Rice

Prentiss Riddle (riddle@rice.edu)

Copyright should be a concern for every person who puts information out on the net. A number of recent court cases show that far from being immune to the usual copyright considerations which govern paper publication, online publishers are increasingly the targets of lawsuits claiming copyright infringement. Rice's Appropriate Use of Computing Faciltiies policy (832-99) reiterates this obligation.

However, our knowledge of copyright issues in the online environment is still evolving. It is to be hoped that a way can be found to balance the University's need to protect itself from liability and its obligation to protect the intellectual property rights of others with the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression which are fundamental to university life.

The key to finding this balance is likely to be individual responsibility: it is up to individual publishers of online material to make sure that they have a legitimate right to publish anything they put online.

THE BAD NEWS

Just because you find material available on the net or find it easy to scan something in from a book or magazine does not mean that you have a right to publish it as you wish. Most printed or online material you are likely to run across is protected by copyright. The lack of a copyright notice on published material doesn't mean that it isn't copyrighted. Most material is automatically copyrighted upon publication unless its author explicitly states otherwise.

THE GOOD NEWS

What you want to do may fit within the legal definition of "fair use". Here's a section of the U.S. Copyright Act:

17 U.S.C. S107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the fair use of a copyrighted work, ... for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use, the factors to be considered shall include --

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

But be aware that numerous court cases, industry guidelines, and pending legislation limit how fair use is applied in the real world. (See, for example, the very specific limitations on Fair Use photocopying in Rice's copyright policy.) To make matters more confusing, the court cases and guidelines that would define fair use for the Web haven't been finalized yet.

If you decide to claim fair use, you'll want to minimize the economic impact of your use on the owners of the material. One way to do this would be to restrict the distribution of the material to the Rice campus. For more information on how to do this, see An Introduction to WWW Access Control.

And for more information on Fair Use and copyright, see the UT System "crash course in copyright" and the Stanford University Fair Use site.

MEANWHILE...

Our working policy for web servers administered by Information Technology will be not to exercise prior restraint on WWW publishers' decisions with regard to copyright. However, we will respond to complaints from inside or outside the University and take action to remove copyright-violating material which is brought to our attention.

-- the RiceInfo support team (riceinfo@rice.edu) 1999.03.24