Hooray for the Stanford Law School Fair Use Victory

Kudos to Stanford's Acting English Professor Carol Shloss's court victory. It seems her victory went a long way to "...push back against overly aggressive copyright enforcement." This case sets a precedent for future cases involving alleged copyright infringement and how much is to much enforcement when its intended purpose is to share others works within an academic framework. "But this is just the first of a series of cases that will be necessary to establish the reality of creative freedom that the 'fair use' doctrine is intended to protect in theory."

I cannot help but wonder just how much those copied excepts packeted and printed for UMass student course requirements, by Collective Copies, contains royalty shares. My guess, and only a guess, is a large part of it. Collective Copies makes a disclaimer on the cover page to insure all that they fully comply with all rightful and legal copyrights. From my perspective, it's possible all these excepts are published under the exemptions scheduled in sec. 107 and, perhaps we're paying royalties to those who are not legally entitled to receive them. Remember, those packets are used in the course of academics not in an arbitrary reproduction mode. Now if student were warned about reproducing those packet without the expressed approval of the rightful owners, then this becomes a legal issue. But I don't see those packets as infringements. This could be a obnoxious case of Collective Copies adhering to owners who have threatened them or the packet organizers, UMass faculty, with litigation if the checks not in the mail. This seems to be another example of an "overly aggressive enforcement" campaign by those strong and talented against the weak and in firmed. Then again, why would faculty care if they're not buying the packets?

Enforcement doesn't need to be formalized by the filing of a cause of complaint or cause of action, it just requires some overt intention from the property owners to sue if the smell of infringement is imminent. Such as their threat, as in the Schloss case, to sue to enforce one's copyrights is no longer a deterrent to lawful republication.

Finally, shame on those UMass faculty members who are being bullied by Collective Copies and those owners who are collecting royalties they are not legally entitled too. By doing this they are depriving graduate and undergraduates 'fair use' access, which, I might add, the statute affords us to "work[s] we love and share it with others."

More to come!