Fair use?

Hi  

I need a little bit of advice if possible.  

We are a small 4 year private college, and I need help deciding if something is fair use or not.  

One teacher has students, each requesting a copy of an entire essay from a book which is a compilation of essays. Although each student probably only requests one copy of one essay at a time, the same essay may be copied several times for different students on the same day. This happens every single semester (we have 5 semesters per year), meaning that the entire book is probably copied several times over each year. The school does own 6 copies of the book.  

Looking at the fair use guidelines, multiple copies seems only to be addressed in the classroom setting, where the teacher makes multiple copies for hand outs. The guidelines are pretty clear that in this instance no more than 3 essays from a compliation can be used in any given semester, and that no more than 9 instances of multiple copying is allowed for any given course each semester. It also seems that semester after semester is not considered fair use anyway. But many requests for the same copy by different students is not specifically covered.  

Given that this book seems to be a key text to the one class and the barrage of copy requests will continue, I don't feel as though this is covered under fair use, and that maybe we should obtain permission to copy, or even buy more copies of the book and use it as a textbook.  

Before I take this up with the teacher concerned, I wanted to pass this by other members of this list for a second opinion :) If there is a way we could apply fair use I'd be very happy to do so.  

Any advice will be gratefully received!  

Thanks  

Colin Easom Received on Thu Apr 07 2005 - 00:15:31 GMT