Scholarly Communication Commons^™

International Copyright In Historical Context: Who Are The Real Pirates?, Paul G. St-Pierre

Charleston Library Conference

Copyright is usually justified with arguments about defending the natural right of authors to control their creations, or claims that limited monopolies spur innovation for the greater good of society. I contrarily assert that the primary intent of copyright has generally been to protect powerful industries in advanced countries and ensure control over emerging markets that rely on the importation of intellectual property.

As global trade expanded in the 19th century, a patchwork quilt of domestic copyright laws and bilateral treaties failed to stem rampant infringement that hurt publishers’ export revenues. Re-printers and readers, however, benefited from lower prices. The …

Wrangling Services Contracts In Libraries, Michael Rodriguez

Charleston Library Conference

As more and more academic libraries outsource information technology services and enter into cooperative consortial schemes with other organizations, librarians push into a minefield of contractual negotiations, obligations, and liabilities more complicated and consequential than the typical e-resource licenses is. A poorly wordsmithed license may result in loss of access to journals, whereas becoming entangled in troubled consortia, watching an essential technology go offline during finals week, or getting audited by a vendor without contractual safeguards or recourse can produce much greater financial and administrative burdens. This concurrent session was a crash course in negotiating service contracts favorable to libraries, …

Don’T Share This Item! Developing Digital Collections And Services In A Consumer‐Licensed World, William M. Cross, Darby Orcutt

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries have always faced unique challenges in providing non‐academic content for academic use, but the digital age has brought particular problems of “one size fits all” consumer purchase models and vexing methods of digital rights management (DRM), wrapped up with a large bow of legal uncertainty for many institutions. These proceedings describe some practices for sharing consumer‐licensed popular materials and confronting legal and technical barriers, as well as what some libraries are considering and encountering in applying the law, fair use, user expectations, and common sense in developing collections and services around digital content that is geared directly to end …