Hansen and Butler Ask, “Does Fair Use Affect Academic Authors’ Incentive to Write? Some Lessons from Authors of Works from the GSU Course Reserves Case”

Here’s a new article written by Dave Hansen (Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communications, Duke University) and Brandon Butler (Director of Information Policy, University of Virginia).
The complete article/blog post (about 1600 words) is available here (via Duke) or here (via UVA).
From the Article:

Copyright law in the U.S. is premised on the idea that exclusive rights given to authors act as an incentive for them to create and disseminate new works, which ultimately benefit the public. Does it actually have that effect, particularly for academic authors? And if so, how does the scope of limitations on copyright, such as fair use, affect the strength of that incentive?
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We thought one way to find that perspective would be to ask authors who are routinely on both sides of the copyright equation, creating and reusing copyrighted works. Specifically, we thought we would ask the authors of the works that form the basis of the GSU lawsuit. That case involves a large number of academic works; at trial the plaintiff-publishers claimed 74 instances of infringement for use of excerpts of works uploaded to GSU course websites over three semesters. Those works were associated with 112 living authors and editors, and for most (79) we were able to identify current contact information

Direct to Full Text Article here (via Duke) or here (via UVA).

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), News, Scholarly Communications