The information bottleneck — electronic copyright issues
| Date | 01 March 1994 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040537 |
| Pages | 3-6 |
| Published date | 01 March 1994 |
| Author | Sandy Norman |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
The information
bottleneck —
electronic copyright
issues
by Sandy Norman, Acting Assistant
Director — Information Technology,
The Library Association
Copyright is frequently mentioned at library IT
conferences as a slight problem to be
overcome. Instead, this article affirms that it is
a major impediment which affects all players
in the electronic information chain. Problems
are reviewed both from the point of view of
information professionals and copyright
holders. The author suggests that librarians
could take on the role of
'emulsifier'
in mixing
copyright and information.
Copyright has been described as the international
trading system for works of
the
mind. Information
contained in copyright works, can also be seen as an
international trading system. When copyright and
information in electronic form are put together,
however, the two mix like oil and water.
Librarians are in the midst of an information
revolution. Information can in theory flow
unimpeded around the world on the global net-
work. Just as the building of the canals and roads
opened up a transport bottleneck in the industrial
revolution, the opening up of the networks has
revolutionised information availability. But what
about the information packages: are they flowing
along these information canals? Legally, no. There
is one bottleneck which remains firmly stoppered
— copyright.
In the previous issue of VINE (95, June 1994),
copyright was mentioned by several of the
contributors as being a barrier to progress to full
electronic document delivery. Go to any library
conference containing papers on aspects of infor-
mation technology and library services and it is
guaranteed that at least one speaker will mention
copyright as 'this slight problem which has to be
overcome'. Copyright cannot be ignored. It is a
major problem which is not only causing concern
to librarians but to all players in the information
chain. This article will attempt to give an overview
of these problems from the point of view of the
copyright owners as well as the library and infor-
mation services profession.
Copyright and electronic
copyright
Copyright gives legal protection to the creators of
certain kinds of material so that they can control
the way their work may be exploited. Copyright
law is also concerned to find a balance between the
legitimate interests of creators who wish to be
rewarded for the reproduction of their works, and
the needs of users to have access to these works.
Under UK copyright legislation, the copying of a
copyright protected work is a restricted act, that is,
one of the acts which only the rights owner can
perform or permit, and that "copying" includes
storing the work in an electronic form. So owners
of copyright can do what they like with their
works whereas everybody else has to follow
certain rules if they want to use these works.
(Please see any of the Library Association Copy-
right guides for further details(1).)
There is no real difference between copyright and
electronic copyright. The distinction lies in the
way the material has to be decoded or read by the
user. Works which are 'published' in electronic
format such as material on CD-ROMs, online
databases, floppy disks etc are protected in the
same way as their printed equivalents. What is
important is that, whereas with printed
information, librarians are allowed to copy and
distribute under a special library privileges ar-
rangement, no such privileges under copyright law
exist for electronic information. Generally speak-
ing, in the UK, librarians and their users have no
rights in electronic information.
Other nations have similar copyright laws, but
each differs from one another in subtle ways
depending on how the government sees copyright
and whether the laws are fairly recent or not. If a
government feels that it has an intellectual proper-
ty industry which is essential to a healthy econo-
my, it may be more biased towards rights owners
than one which has a more relaxed attitude with
maybe more cultural and educational aims. Some
national copyright laws may be so old that they
VINE
96
(September 1994)
— 3
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