Electronic Highways:
Copyright & Fair Use in an Electronic Environment

Issues surrounding intellectual property rights, copyright law, and fair use are being widely discussed in higher education as new technologies and educational innovations raise increasingly complex questions about how we conduct ourselves in an electronic environment-how we teach, learn, perform research, share information, and communicate scholarship online. For faculty, administrators, students, staff, librarians, and computing personnel concerned with these issues, there are a number of sites on the World Wide Web which offer background information and guidance on copyright and fair use and their application to such areas as Web page publication, multimedia, image archives, distance education, and electronic publishing.

You might want to begin by looking at Fair Use of Copyrighted Works produced by CETUS, a consortium of the State University of New York, the California State University System, and the City University of New York. CETUS was formed to explore initiatives in technology-assisted teaching, learning, and research, and one of its objectives is to investigate and clarify issues related to the sharing of information resources and the protection of intellectual property. The purpose of the document on fair use, which can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.cetus.org/fairindex.html, is to "further an understanding of intellectual property rights and the critical role of fair use in teaching, learning, and scholarship." The document also contains links to fair use guidelines and other resources on the Internet related to copyright.

Next, for those of you who want more in-depth coverage of the issues, we recommend the Stanford University Libraries Copyright & Fair Use Site at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/, which contains links to the full text of related statutes, judicial opinions, regulations, current legislation, and cases, including an analysis of key issues and developments. The Stanford site also provides links to other WWW sites, discussion lists, and a collection of articles that allow you to explore the many facets of copyright and fair use. Articles include "Copyright Law in the Electronic Environment" by Georgia Harper from the Office of General Counsel for the University of Texas System; "Copyright Law, Libraries, and Universities: Overview, Recent Developments, and Future Issues," by Kenneth Crews, Associate Professor of Business Law, San Jose State University; "Copyright in the New World of Electronic Publishing," by William Strong of Kotin, Crabtree, and Strong, Attorneys at Law, Boston, Mass.; and "Can Fair Use Survive Our Information-based Future?" by John Erickson of the Interactive Media Lab, Dartmouth Medical School and Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College.

To connect to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

­Loss Pequeno Glazier and Nancy Schiller, University Libraries