Related Links: Copyright Management Center:
New technologies offer tremendous opportunities to strengthen scholarly endeavors, but they also escalate the debate over what is known as "fair use."
Higher education has grappled for decades with copyright implications surrounding photocopies, transparencies and videotapes. Now, the age of digital technology has brought colleges and universities a new array of questions about the fair, or lawful, use of copyright-protected materials for education and research -- and Indiana University is at the forefront of efforts to answer those questions.
The Copyright Management Center, located at IUPUI, serves to promote a constructive understanding of fair use on all IU campuses. The university has also funded, through the Strategic Directions Charter, the Institute for the Study of Intellectual Property and Education to sponsor educational programs and policy guidance. The institute also is located at IUPUI.
The National Infrastructure Task Force has convened the Conference on Fair Use, or Confu, which has spent more than two years negotiating guidelines to articulate the meaning of fair use for education and libraries. While proposed guidelines may alleviate some tensions, they may also exacerbate underlying conflicts and promote further critical debate.
On April 4, the IU Institute for the Study of Intellectual Property and Education sponsored a "town meeting" on the proposed Confu guidelines. The meeting brought to IUPUI some of the nation's leading scholars on these issues. Nearly 100 participants attended from IU and from 15 states as far away as Massachusetts, Florida and California.
The town meeting and the national debate have revealed that the educational community is not prepared to embrace the Confu guidelines. Some academics welcome clarification of fair use, but others are deeply troubled by the relatively rigid and conservative guidelines. Moreover, the guidelines are not law, so the academic community may continue to explore and experiment with fair use.
With that in mind, the institute provides materials, conducts seminars and addresses concerns of faculty, librarians and staff about copyright and fair use. The institute also is taking steps toward helping the community adopt new fair-use standards that may preserve the flexibility of fair use, meet diverse and changing circumstances and serve copyright's ultimate goal: to promote the progress of learning and the sharing of knowledge.
Related Links:
Copyright Management Center:
http://www.iupui.edu/it/copyinfo
Conference on Fair Use:
http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/confu
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