What’s Fair about Fair Use? The Battle over E-Reserves at GSU

Abstract

The fair use case study puts students in the strategic and decision-making position of the legal counsel at Georgia State University, faced with responding to a copyright infringement suit from Cambridge University Press, SAGE Publishers, and Oxford University Press. The publisher-plaintiffs alleged that 6,700 electronic course materials exceeded reasonable standards of educational fair use. However, the “reasonable standards” were up for debate: the copyright statute of fair use is intentionally flexible, but over time, clear-cut extralegal guidelines made their way into court decisions. For decades, publishers, authors, libraries, and universities had yet to reach consensus about best practices and workable standards of fair use. With the complaint lodged against GSU, the contention had become cannibalistic: the publishing arms of universities suing universities.

The case surveys the legal and extralegal history of educational fair use; the relationship of universities and academic publishers; the history of litigation surrounding coursepacks, reserves, and electronic course materials; and the copyright policies at GSU. Participants adopt the position of GSU’s general counsel to weigh risk and decide whether GSU should settle or take the suit to trial. The case also gets students to consider the strengths and limitations of existing copyright law, the impact of technology on fair use, the interests of various stakeholders, and options for building consensus among such stakeholders.