From Library Babel Fish, June 13, 2011
You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a route that passes through the middle ground between light and shadow. Your next stop – the copyright Twilight Zone!
Imagine it’s a year or two from now. You’re preparing to teach an upper division course and want to assign a dozen groundbreaking journal articles published over the past century. Last time you taught the course, students wrestled with the primary research, but it gave them a much better sense of how the disciplines works than any available textbook would. The registrar has just sent out a reminder to get your reading list together early so students can see how much their texts will cost when they register for courses. You dutifully go to the Compliance Office’s website and calculate how much students will need to pay to read the dozen articles that you plan to upload to Moodle. Wow, that was more than you thought! They won’t be too happy about paying $350 for articles they will have to print off themselves. You really don’t want to get hammered in student evaluations again. Maybe you can just summarize the main points in lectures.But you make a note to avoid quoting too much from any of them, since you seem to remember that if you read more than 500 words out loud, you might be in trouble. Or is it 400 words?
You push that problem away to prepare for class. A special issue of your society’s journal published this week is devoted to the concept that you’re covering this afternoon. What a goldmine! One of the articles has a chart that will really get the idea across, and another one has a table full of results that would be perfect for a discussion. You make a couple of screen shots and start to insert them in your slide deck before remembering that you’re only allowed to use one illustration from any journal issue without first getting permission. You send quick e-mails to the authors, who you know from conferences. Both reply almost instantly. They’re thrilled that you want to use their research in your teaching. Unfortunately, they don’t own the copyright. You’ll have to go through the publisher. That’s okay, you know the publisher; it’s your society after all. But since the organization outsourced their publishing operations, the copyright belongs to a for-profit corporation based in Europe. You search for their permissions policy online, but run out of time. Would have been sweet . . .
After class you check your e-mail and find that an article you requested through interlibrary loan has arrived and is ready for pickup. You send a reply that the attachment seems to have been left off. The message you get back is so baffling you pick up the phone and call the library’s interlibrary loan department. A student employee answers. “Yes, we have it printed out for you. You can pick it up whenever we’re open. Oh, and we close at six today.”
“Why six?”
“Some budget thing.”
“But this article . . . why c