Re: electronic storage

> A teaching colleague wants to scan 6 articles from 6 different journals
> and 1 chapter of a book into a computer file which will be accessible on the
> University network. It will be a Read Only file - no downloading or
> printing - and will be password protected to be able to be accessed by only
> the 120 students in the course. At the end of the course the file will be
> purged.
>
>
> Please comment on the copyright implications. Thank you.
>
> Ron naylor
> Un of Miami

Your colleague does have copyright problems. Clearly, there has been copying and the question is what limitations on exclusive rights would apply. This pushes fair use to outer edges. The purpose is for education in a non-profit educational institution. It might help to know that nature of the work - technical or scholarly works are more likely to get by than novels. Your colleague is copying the entire article and a whole chapter. The question of effect on the potential market is a factual matter but the publishers might be able to show some loss of revenue.

Many academics copy this amount without encountering problems because they do not sell them at a profit and do not run into the problem of profit making copy houses making the profit on classroom packets. In short, there are problems but these are problems with which academics routinely ignore. Limiting access and purging may have some effect on the loss of potential market.

  Don Berman --  

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