COPYRIGHT AND LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM
| Pages | 45-55 |
| Date | 01 February 1958 |
| Published date | 01 February 1958 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026253 |
| Author | G. WOLEDGE |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Journal
of
DOCUMENTATION
Volume 14
JUNE
1958 Number 2
COPYRIGHT
AND
LIBRARIES
IN THE
UNITED KINGDOM
by G.
WOLEDGE,
B.A.
British
Library
of
Political
and
Economic Science
RECENT changes
in
the British law of copyright make
it
opportune
to
survey
the principal ways
in
which
it now
affects libraries,
and
this
is
done
in the
present paper, which also gives
a
short account of the way
the
changes have
come about,
and
discusses
the
alternatives offered
to
libraries
in
some cases
by
the
'fair dealing' exceptions
and the
special library exceptions.
Preliminaries
The Berne copyright convention,
to
which
the
United Kingdom
is a
signatory,
was
revised
at
Brussels
in
1948,
and in due
course,
in
1951,
the
Board of Trade set up
a
committee
to
consider what changes
in
the law were
made desirable
by the
convention
and
also
by
'technical developments',
of
which
the one of
principal concern
to
libraries
was the
development
of
photocopying; attention had been focused
on
the latter
by
the Royal Society
Scientific Information Conference
of
1948,
and by
that Society's subsequent
'Fair copying declaration'
(see
below, p. 52). The chairman of the committee
was
at
first
the
Marquess
of
Reading,
and
after
his
resignation
Sir
Henry
Gregory (who
had
originally joined
the
committee as
a
representative of the
Board of Trade); the membership included one librarian, Mr. J. Lamb, City
Librarian
of
Sheffield.
It
held fifty-seven meetings,
and
received evidence
from Aslib,
the
Library Association,
the
British Museum
and the
other
libraries of deposit,
the
Science Museum (whose library is
a
principal source
of photocopies
of
scientific material),
the
Historical Manuscripts Commis-
sion,
and
the Royal Society.
Its
report1 was published
in
October 1952,
and
its recommendations were largely
but by no
means completely followed
in
the subsequent legislation.
The
more important
of
those relevant
to our
purposes are mentioned
in
the appropriate places below.
In
1952 the United
Kingdom signed
the new
Universal Copyright Convention, which imposes
other obligations which
the
subsequent legislation also provides
for.
1
Board
of
Trade,
Report
of the
Copyright
Committee,
Cmd.
8662. H.M.S.O.
E
45
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