Re: Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com>]

I was present at the launch of this report. The British Academy's 
approach was to ask fellows what problems they had encountered 
using copyrighted content in their own work (I simplify but this 
was the gist of it). They did consult a group concerned with 
intellectual property issues. They did not however consult any 
publishers or any librarians.

It looks as if the sort of problems distinguished academic 
authors have in getting permissions are entirely or almost 
entirely with the music industry and picture libraries - see the 
examples in the text. The links between this sort of evidence and 
the recommendations is not (to my mind) at all clear and the 
chairman of the group preparing this report admitted that there 
is a lot of work to be done before any systematic view is 
reached. In particular I was puzzled about the concerns over 
digital rights management, an enemy which is often invoked. I do 
not know of any publisher of scholarly books or primary scholarly 
journals which implements digital rights management. Does anyone 
on this list know of instances? I imagine such implementation 
would cost quite a bit

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 9:21 PM
Subject: Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content

> Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content
> http://www.libraryjournal.com/clear/CA6380712.html?nid=2673#news1
>
> The British Academy, a national body for the advancement of
> humanities and social sciences, has released an eye-opening
> report, sponsored by the European Commission, suggesting the
> application of copyright law in the United Kingdom may be
> inhibiting the work of scholars and offering ten
> "recommendations" for redress, including possible government
> regulation of licensing deals. Among the report's conclusions:
> copyright exemptions such as "fair dealing" (fair use) should
> "normally be sufficient for academic and scholarly use," but that
> "problems lie in narrow interpretation," both by rights holders
> and by publishers; that copyright holders, as a result of the
> development of new media, "are more aggressive in seeking to
> maximize revenue from the rights, even if the legal basis of
> their claims is weak;" and that there are "well-founded" concerns
> that new database rights and the development of digital rights
> management systems (DRM) "may enable rights holders to circumvent
> the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate
> research and scholarship."
>
> The report, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social
> Sciences: A British Academy Review was composed by a working
> group of eight members, appointed by the British Academy and
> drawn from a range of subjects in the humanities and social
> sciences along with help from the Centre for the Study of
> Intellectual and Technology Property Law at the University of
> Edinburgh.
>
> ****