From: Kevin Smith <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2013 12:58:52 +0000 In the past month there have been a couple of developments in the area of copyright, fair use and the lawsuit against Georgia State that perhaps have not gotten as much attention as they deserve. I am always hesitant to repost my own blog posts to lists, but in this case I have been asked twice to make these developments better known in the library community. The first development was the oral argument held in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the GSU case. As I say in the blog, it was a rather strange session, which neither bode well for GSU nor reflected well on the preparation of the judges who are hearing the case. There were fundamental misunderstandings expressed from the bench both about the facts of the case and the applicable law. Both lawyers seem bemused and uncertain how to respond to the left-field questions that these misunderstandings generated, although the lawyer for the plaintiff publishers finally decided that his best course was to agree with the judges and encourage their mistakes, since they tended to favor his clients. My detailed account of these arguments is at http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/11/20/a-discouraging-day-in-court-for-gsu/. There is also a piece about the arguments by Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/60087-appeals-court-questions-gsu-e-reserves-verdict.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly&utm_campaign=32c7485c8a-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0bb2959cbb-32c7485c8a-304620301. The other development tends entirely the other way, towards a sane and sensible interpretation of fair use. Ironically, it comes from a very similar lawsuit to the GSU case, but brought in Israel by some publishers against Hebrew University and interpreting the Israeli fair use provision, which was added to the Israeli law in 2007 and is nearly identical to that in the U.S. That case settled last week with an agreement that recognizes as fair use reproduction of entire journal articles and up to 20% of books for both non-profit printed course packs and e-reserves. As I say in this blog post -- http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2013/12/02/fair-use-georgia-state-and-the-rest-of-the-world/ -- if the U.S plaintiffs had been willing to accept such a rational agreement, the protracted and damaging lawsuit against GSU could have been avoided. Yesterday I heard from Professor Niva Elkin-Koren of Haifa University that an English translation of the settlement agreement is now available -- it wasn’t when I wrote my post -- so I offer these new links in partial justification for this message, which otherwise just shamelessly cites my own work of the past month: http://weblaw.haifa.ac.il/en/academyincommunity/cliniclist/tech/projects/pages/fairuse.aspx http://weblaw.haifa.ac.il/he/AcademyInCommunity/ClinicList/tech/projects/Documents/Shoken%20HU%20Settlement%202013.pdf Kevin L. Smith, M.L.S., J.D. Director, Copyright and Scholarly Communication Duke University Libraries Durham, NC 27708 [log in to unmask]