EDITORIAL
LIVING WITH THE NEW COPYRIGHT LAW Science has been nutured throughout most of its history by a n open literature, by a relatively easy accessibility to the reports of research and discoveries of all scientists in every part of the world. There were no barriers to this accessibility. What was new was published in journals, and freely exchanged with others a t technical meetings or via correspondence. Scientific libraries had all the journals they could afford, and everything in the library was available, not only to the community of scientists the library served, but to any other library through Interlibrary Loan. To say there were no barriers to the exchange of scientific information is not quite true. The two World Wars did cut off communications between nations; and secret research during and after World War I1 put scientific communications in crepuscular shadows. What effect the new Copyright Law will have on scientific communications is yet to be known. The consensus among users who have read the law is that it will be regressive. In any event, the new Copyright Law, which was signed by President Ford on October 19, 1976, takes effect on January 1, 1978. Regardless of what we may think or how we may feel about the new law, we must learn to live with it until changes are made. Two sections of the law specifically are relevant to document accessibility and to library sevices: Sections 107 and 108. Section 107 defines the concept of fair use; viz., “reproduction ... for purposes such as criticism, ... news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright”, but with consideration of factors, such as “the purpose and character of the use”, Le., of a “commercial nature” or “for nonprofit educational purposes” and “the effect of the (fair) use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work“. The primary concept in Section 107 is to consider “a use that supplants any part of the normal market for a copyrighted work” as a n infringement. Section 108 is addressed to limitations on reproducing copyrighted works. Accordingly, “it is not an infringement ... for a library ... to reproduce no more than one copy ... or to distribute such copy ... if ... made without any purpose of ... commercial advantage; the library is open to the public or available ... to other persons” (outside of the community served by the library) “doing research in a specialized field”; and the copy “includes a notice of copyright”. The law does not “impose liability for copyright infringement upon a library ... for the unsupervised use of reproducing equipment ... provided such equipment displays a notice that the making of a copy may be subject to the copyright law”. The above is but a gist of the sections which are most relevant to the readers of this Journal. Most certainly each of us should obtain a copy of the law (Public Law 94-553),
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read it carefully, and, if necessary, have it interpreted by a corporate lawyer, especially for those statements that seem to be contradictory when read as English rather than Legalese. Particularly puzzling is the law’s differentiation of industrial libraries, public libraries, and academic libraries, and its assumption that all use of an industrial library is for the furtherance of the organization’s commercial enterprise. The way I read the law, each industrial organization is considered as one user regardless of the number of scientists and engineers doing basic research, regardless of their geographical distribution, and regardless of why they want a copy of a journal article, including the desire to maintain their educational status. There is one redeeming feature in the law: “five years from the effective data ... the Register of Copyrights ... shall submit to the Congress a report setting forth the extent to which this section (108) has achieved ... the rights of creators, and the needs of users”. Publishers of scientific and technical journals, under the aegis of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), have organized the Copyright Clearance Center for establishment of its Copyright Payment Center (CPC) by January 3, 1978. The purpose of C P C is to provide a centralized mechanism for users to pay copying fees to member publishers-CPC will not provide copies-it is only a fee collecting agency. For this service to publishers, the users (libraries) will be charged a service fee (best guess at the moment is 25 cents) in addition to what the publisher has established as its copying charge. article copying fee. Each individual publisher will set its own article copying fee. The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has already announced its copying fee: for articles published between 1/1/73 and 12/31/17 the fee will be 25 cents per article; from 1/1/78 on, the fee will vary according to a schedule with the minimum being $1 per article. Duplication costs, of course, will be borne by the library. Also, publishers such as A I P will require authors to transfer their copyrights as articles are accepted for publication (see “AIP Copyright Law Policies” in News Items of this issue). CPC suggests that users of the service report their copying by providing a copy of the first page of each article copied, marked with the user’s name and number of copies made; or by providing a computerized record of copying transactions. We have yet to learn how many publishers will be members of CPC and how libraries will have to deal with nonmembers and with Interlibrary Loan transactions. I am a firm believer in the heritage of the substantive law as stated in our Constitution and as affirmed in the 1909 Copyright Law. I now have some qualms over the potential perversion of the substantive law in our attempts to live with the new Copyright Law. HERMAN SKOLNIK
Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1977
