Re: What does Tasini mean for us librarians?

[Tony Ferguson <ferguson@columbia.edu>]

Many in the library world have pushed the concept of authors should retain
copyright -- I assume as a means of hamstringing commercial publishers.  
Tasini is quite similiar.  For me, while I can sympathize with freelance
authors, this is a real step backwards if our goal is to provide our
patrons ready access to information.  Tony

Ann Okerson wrote:

____________

> Finally I got around to reading the Second Circuit decision of "Tasini vs.
> New York Times," handed down on September 24th, 1999.  This decision has
> been the subject of much discussion on the cni-copyright list, but not yet
> on liblicense-l.  But, shouldn't it be?
>
> In this recent ruling, an overturn of the decision of the lower court, the
> judges gave to writers, at least freelance writers whose material is
> republished in an electronic aggregation-database, a major victory.
>
> That is, the judges ruled that a publisher who wishes to grant rights to
> an aggregator to include works in that aggregators database, may not
> automatically do so.  The publisher must have the author's permission.
> The publisher is *not* protected by the privilege against copyright
> infringement afforded to publishers of collective works.  This very
> readable decision describes the process by which a periodical or newspaper
> is made available to NEXIS and how an article loses any sense of its
> original context in the subsequent aggregated database publication.
>
> My reading of the decision, hardly an authoritative reading of course,
> says to me that the aggregations that my library colleagues and I license
> (collections like Lexis-Nexis, Academic Universe, ProQuestDirect, Ebsco
> Academic and others) are likely to contain numerous articles whose authors
> have not, therefore, given permission for inclusion in such collections.
> This in turn suggests to me that suddenly those aggregators may have
> discovered that they did not have the right to further license those
> aggregations to customers such as my library.
>
> So, now what?  Any experts out there?
>
> Ann Okerson
> Yale University Library
> Ann.Okerson@yale.edu