BTLJ is excited to welcome David R. Hansen of UNC Law School on April 3–4, 2014 to the 18th Annual BTLJ/BCLT Symposium: The Next Great Copyright Act.
This is a summary of Mr. Hansen’s topic of discussion and forthcoming article:
U.S. libraries, archives, and museums are stewards of some of the largest collections of copyrighted content in the world. These institutions hold well over 2.8 billion items, the vast majority published since 1922, the year in which the public domain effectively ends for many users in the United States. This article is about how Section 108 reform can help (and potentially hurt) these organizations in their efforts to preserve and make this content more available to the world.
The existing law of fair use, first sale, and statutory limitations on remedies are all critically important tools for further opening library and archive collections to the world. Indeed, with current library practice, Section 108 is of little use for many library projects; the flexible doctrine of fair use is relied upon instead. Any effort to reform Section 108 must, as its first goal, preserve the availability of fair use and these other tools. But within that context, a modest update to Section 108 could provide an important safe harbor for libraries and archives that seek more certainty about making their collections available online.