Photocopied materials with videotape

Jackie McKay, I accidentally deleted your response to my posting regarding whether or not it would be advisable to use photocopies of materials that were included with a videotape our library had purchased. We questioned whether or not the photocopies were made with permission and were not going to use them unless we could determine that they were legally made.

I'm trying to paraphrase from memory here, but I believe you expressed the opinion that since the topic was not especially "hot" our approach seemed overly cautious to you and in effect we were censoring the photocopied material by not making it available.

If this correctly represents what you said, I think you've missed the point. It doesn't matter whether or not the topic is hot. Nor is it a matter of censorship since our library owns and makes available most of the popular periodicals from which the photocopies were taken. What does matter is whether or not I'm making my institution liable for copyright infringement if I allow the photocopies to be added to our collection. A previous poster on this subject pointed out that the distributor of the video may well have violated copyright in producing the photocopies but it is not clear that we would be violating the copyright holder's rights by possessing unlawfully copied works. Another individual suggested that we would probably be doing the wise thing in not adding the photocopies.

So this rather trivial issue appears to fall under a grey area. Unfortunately we will likely opt to err on the side of caution not because we're goody-goodies, but because our institutional policy requires that we abide by the provisions of the Copyright Act.

Jim Cubit jcubit[_at_]williams.edu
Assistant College Librarian
Williams College
Williamstown, MA 01267 (413)597-2503 Received on Thu Sep 16 1993 - 20:05:52 GMT