April 17, 2008
Librarians React to Lawsuit Against Georgia State U.
News broke yesterday that three scholarly publishers—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications—have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia State University. Focusing on “unauthorized digital distribution” of copyrighted material—in electronic course-reading packs, for instance—the plaintiffs call the practice “pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing” at GSU, and seek an injunction to stop it.
In their public comments, the plaintiffs have been careful not to antagonize librarians, pointing out that they have close working relationships with many libraries, and that other institutions—Hofstra, Cornell, Syracuse, and Marquette, for instance—have negotiated agreements that satisfy publishers’ concerns. But it’s not lost on librarians that Charlene Hurt, the university’s dean of libraries, is one of four Georgia State officials named in the suit.
Library Journal posted a long article about the suit yesterday. And blogging librarians have begun to weigh in on what the legal action might mean for them. Dorothea at Caveat Lector says she’d “hate to be Georgia State” right now. Barbara Fister at ACRLog calls the news “alarming” and says “it appears to have widespread implications.”
Kevin Smith, blogging at Scholarly Communications @ Duke, dissects the publishers’ legal strategy. Then he throws down the gauntlet:
The complaint against Georgia State acknowledges fair use, as it must, but it relegates it to a tiny fraction of situations, none of which can realistically be expected to occur on a modern college campus. In effect, this is an attempt to enforce judicially a “pay-per-use” model of content distribution. The real irony is that it is justified as an attempt to remedy a “free-rider” problem — the claim that universities are appropriating the work of publishers and authors without just compensation. This claim is patently absurd, given the amount of money university libraries invest in published resources, but it is downright offensive when the real issue is clarified. Publishers here are themselves the free-riders, obtaining a huge amount of academic content from the universities and their faculty without compensation.
Those are fighting words, and it will be interesting to see how widely they’re shared by the library community—and how publishers address them.
Jennifer Howard | Posted on Thursday April 17, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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For Kevin Smith’s benefit, the “free rider” argument is not “patently absurd.” Here is how I put it on a posting for InsideHigherEd earlier today:
“The basic issue here, for university presses, is fairness—not just ‘fair use’ in a legal sense, but fairness in the allocation of the burden of supporting scholarly publication. Why should the faculty and students at Georgia State get a ‘free ride”‘on the labor and investment of those some 80 American universities that support university presses? Because they are not paying anything for the privilege of using the materials that presses produce, they are not doing anything to support the whole system of scholarly communication on which those very students and faculty depend. Many GSU faculty rely on publications with university presses to gain tenure and promotion. By paying nothing for use of our publications, they are essentially asking other universities to help them gain tenure and promotion while contributing nothing to the cost of running the system. I should think the universities that pay the costs for the system would object to having Georgia State take advantage of it without helping support it.”
Of course, GSU buys some of our books and subscribes to some of our journals. But does it feel that by so purchasing them they are free to reprint them at will? This makes them nothing more than a “parasitical” publisher, no better than the foreign pirates that reprint huge quantities of U.S. intellectual property, thereby robbing the U.S. economy of billions of dollars that would help the balance of trade.
— Sandy Thatcher Apr 17, 05:05 PM #
But Sandy, how much money do scholarly journals pay their authors? Usually nothing. The intellectual content of your journals is basically subsidized by tuition and, in the case of state-supported institutions, taxpayers, who financially suport the scholars so that you don’t have to pay them for their content. Furthermore, the authors of your articles use libraries’ collections, either printed items that libraries have bought or electronic versions that we’ve licensed, so the libraries are also directly paying to provide your authors with much of the research material that goes into the publications that you now think we should pay over-and-over again to provide access to. The “burden” of supporting scholarly publication is not, primarily, on the journal publisher but on the providers (usually libraries) of materials which make scholarly investigation possible in the first place. On top of this, all three of these publishers now publish more and more low-quality materials, especially under the guise of reference guides and “companions,” that are way overpriced in relation to their scholarly originality and value and have diluted the prestige of their imprints.
— Rob Apr 17, 05:20 PM #