By JAMES M. O'NEILL - BLOOMBERG NEWS
U.S. college professors are flunking basic copyright protection law.
Book publishers say professors who post long excerpts of protected texts on the Internet without permission cost the industry at least $20 million a year.
Cornell University, the Ivy League college in Ithaca, N.Y., agreed in September to regulate work its faculty puts on the Web, in response to a threatened lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers.
Professors are making material available free rather than requiring students to buy $100 textbooks. While faculty members from Harvard University to the University of Pennsylvania complain of a restricted flow of ideas, publishers say they must protect $3.35 billion in annual U.S. college textbook sales.
"We can't compete with free," says Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs with the Washington-based publishers group, whose members include McGraw-Hill Cos. and Pearson Plc.
Cornell became the first school to respond to publishers by agreeing that legal guidelines for printing copyrighted material should apply to Web use, according to Vice Provost John Siliciano.
"This Cornell agreement is a major event," says Tracey Armstrong, chief operating officer at the Copyright Clearance Center, a non-profit licensing agent in Danvers, Mass., that collects royalties from more than 1,000 universities on behalf of publishers. The deal is significant because it contains guidelines that may be used in future college agreements, she says.
The accord between Cornell and publishers includes a checklist to help teachers decide whether they need to obtain publisher permission before posting material. It doesn't specify a limit on the number of words or paragraphs that may be taken from a work. The agreement recommends that teachers use temporary passwords, identification numbers or other means to limit access to copyrighted electronic course content.
The conflict stems from the interpretation of "fair use" as allowed under laws passed by Congress. The concept is intended to protect the financial stake of creators and publishers while allowing a limited use of material for artistic, creative or educational purposes, such as when critics quote short passages from works they review.
Copyright law doesn't quantify where "fair use" ends and where a violation begins, says Kenneth Crews, a law professor at Indiana University and director of its Copyright Management Center in Indianapolis.
"These situations are filled with conflicts and dilemma," Crews says. "One is just understanding the definition of 'fair use.' It's an inherently flexible doctrine. It can be interpreted differently by different courts under the same circumstances."
"Professors were putting up multiple chapters from books on course Web sites, and it would be repeated from semester to semester with successive classes, with students purchasing nothing," Adler says, referring to Cornell and other schools.
In a Cornell course in late 2005, 25 separate works on the syllabus were freely available to students as reserved electronic postings on an internal Web site.
Illegal use of posted material is widespread, hurting publishers of novels, biographies, historical non-fiction and other works, as well as textbooks, says Patricia Schroeder, the president of the publishers association and a former Colorado congresswoman.
"Our board was very surprised at the breadth of it," says Schroeder, who declines to name other colleges the association will confront.
"We hope schools will look at the Cornell guidelines and do some self-policing."
At the request of professors, college libraries used to hold certain hard copies of a book in reserve to provide access to students in a particular course. Now, electronic reserves let the library scan and post parts of works on an internal Web site for students using pass codes that expire at the course's end.
The Cornell campus store assembles course packs and handles payment of permission fees, which alone are "considerably in excess" of $200,000 per year, she says.
Some faculty members use outside vendors, and others handle copyright permissions directly, while the university library licenses electronic journals with varying uses permitted.
"Students don't like paying so much for books, especially for books they barely use," says Chris Fee, an English professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania who uses the Internet in his class.
Fee says he's used his own material, such as photos he took at Viking runic sites in Scotland, and that he's careful to get permission before posting any copyrighted material.
