RE: Unreferenced Notes from an Instructor

From: Angela Mott <angmott[_at_]uflib.ufl.edu>
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 18:20:00 -0400

Meghann,

I would think that this would qualify as fair use, but I would follow the same course you mentioned and have the professor weigh their use on the scale of fair use.

As an interesting side note though, I recently ran across an old court case that dealt with something similar from early in the 1900's. I think today the defendant would have won using a fair use defense, but back then there wasn't any provision in the law for fair use, and the plaintiff won. The name of the case was MACMILLAN CO. v. KING from 1914. A link to the case is: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/primary_materials/cases/c223F862.html An interesting and worthwhile read.

~Angela

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Angela Mott
Electronic Reserves & Copyright Permission Coordinator George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida

-----Original Message-----
From: Meghann Matwichuk [mailto:mtwchk[_at_]UDel.Edu] Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 4:00 PM
To: CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property Subject: [CNI-(C)] Unreferenced Notes from an Instructor

Hello all,

I am a new subscriber to this listserv and look forward to learning more about copyright issues through the discussions that take place here.

I've received the following request from an instructor:

"I have read a great book and taken notes on each chapter. I have typed them up and am wondering if I could give them to the students. They do NOT include references and quotations because I state at the beginning that they are all the author's words and voice and none of it can be attributed to me in any way, whatsoever. It is a summary of each chapter. Let me know if you think I should NOT let the students have a copy of the summary. I don't want to get into trouble and more important, I don't want to encourage plagiarism in any form. If by giving them a copy of my notes from the book, they begin to think they don't have to use footnotes or that it is ok to use someone else's voice, I would feel tremendous regret."

My instinct is that she is within fair use in distributing these notes to her students. I plan on referring her the following checklist:

http://copyright.iupui.edu/checklist.htm

Any thoughts / opinions on the matter? I suppose I'm just looking for some reinforcement before I respond to her -- or to hear if I'm missing something obvious! Thanks in advance.

Best,

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Meghann R. Matwichuk
Instructional Media Department
Morris Library
University of Delaware
181 S. College Ave.
Newark, DE 19717
(302) 831-1475

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Visit the CNI-COPYRIGHT e-mail list archive at <https://mail2.cni.org/Lists/CNI-COPYRIGHT/>. Received on Wed May 11 2005 - 02:20:00 GMT