James Boyle is visiting the School of Information and Library Science to speak with the TRLN Doctoral Fellows Program Seminar Series on “Issues and Trends in Academic Librarianship.”
Right now he’s talking about the development of copyright up til 1950 when copyright violation became easier to do than to not do increasingly til today when making copies is a daily if not hourly occurance by each individual in a high tech society.
First sale doctrine. You can do stuff with the books you buy including loaning for reading and even reselling those books, but in cyberspace access and copies and reselling might be in violation. The old rules were based on an idea that the transaction costs are high. Now transaction costs are very very low. Should every act of knowledge acquisition be a market transaction?
At 9/11 two bills started through congress, PATRIOT and a Copy Protection Law that included requiring copy protection on all electronic devices and that content folks could hack citizen’s devices.
Present dangers: abolishing “the analog hole” (see also Cory on this), webcast treaty (50 year ownership of that which is broad or webcast) to harmonize with the Rome Treaty, extensions of DMCA, harmonizing, database treaty, making acts that were civil into criminal, abolishing machine features that allow copying (even “Trusted Computing“).
Now the good news. The public is aware including places like the New York Times and Wash Post etc. And there is a public movement on rights — especially as it concerns consumer electronics.
Now about private solutions. His put a brick in the toilet ecology examples. But first policy and courts. Tell that there is another side of the story. Consumers? No that frame is restictive. A2K Access to Knowledge, information ecology, developing nations arguements, etc and international. The international movement puts pressure on NGOs. Librarians must be involved. Everyone loves librarians.
Librarians need to push for universal readers knowledge rights and fair use. Make fair use a reality. It must be more than “The right to hire a lawyer” (Lessig). Jamie tells the story of trying to copy his own articles at Boston University and being denied.

Every librarian should conduct a copyright audit to see who makes the decisions on fair use.
North Carolina Open Government Alliance
There should be an ALA Hall of Shame – worst general counsels of universities in the US, the worst scholarly press, etc
Is there a market? If not, no market harm. If you don’t use fair use, you will use it.
Librarians are the ones who should educate about copyright policy (not tech folks for example). Funny tale on Duke tech folks sending out an email warning not to copy that contained both a request to copy and an appropriated image.
Use the existing law and use it properly.

Contracts. Universities write their own exemptions for research allusion to Madey v Duke.
Scholars have a right to self-archiving within limits and should use that.
Dspace, Creative Commons and an active community to educate folks is powerful and a good place for librarians to make an impact.
How can medical librarians get participation in PubMed? asks Joanne Marshall. Boyle says that the approach was wrong in that it didn’t use several approaches but instead only one. Boyle thinks that public domain is not enough as authors desire attribution at minimum.
Worm people are big sharers but human geneticists were less sharing so the worm people helped drive the mapping at The Genome Project.