Required Reading: Appeals Court Instructs District Court for Second Time on Fair Use of Course Materials; Lexology, November 30, 2018

McDermott Will & Emery - Jodi Benassi, Lexology; Required Reading: Appeals Court Instructs District Court for Second Time on Fair Use of Course Materials

 

"The US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit vacated a district court’s judgment for a second time, finding that the lower court misinterpreted its instructions on remand and failed to give each excerpt of the copyrighted works the holistic analysis the Copyright Act demands. Cambridge University Press, et al. v. J.L. Albert, et al., Case No. 16-15726 (11th Cir. Oct. 19, 2018) (Pryor, J)."

For Second Time, Appeals Court Hears GSU E-Reserves Case; Publishers Weekly, August 4, 2017

Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly; For Second Time, Appeals Court Hears GSU E-Reserves Case

"In what the plaintiff publishers’ attorney Bruce Rich called a “seemingly never-ending case,” an appeals court last week heard oral arguments in the long-running Georgia State University (GSU) e-reserves case for a second time. And judging by the court’s questions, the case could still be far from a conclusion.

In the hearing, which went for just over an hour, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, once again pressed attorneys for the fault lines in the decade-old copyright case case, with much of the hearing focusing on whether Judge Orinda Evans correctly evaluated the fourth factor of the four factor fair use test (the effect on the market), and then properly weighted that factor in making her fair use determinations."

Colleges Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Copyright Monitoring; Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/17/16

Pamela Samuelson, Chronicle of Higher Education; Colleges Shouldn’t Have to Deal With Copyright Monitoring:

"Colleges have a big stake in the outcome of the lawsuit that three publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications, brought against Georgia State University officials for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, now in its eighth year, challenged GSU’s policy that allowed faculty members to upload excerpts (mainly chapters) of in-copyright books for students to read and download from online course repositories.

Four years ago, a trial court held that 70 of the 75 challenged uses were fair uses. Two years ago, an appellate court sent the case back for a reassessment under a revised fair-use standard. The trial court has just recently ruled that of the 48 claims remaining in the case, only four uses, each involving multiple chapters, infringed. The question now is, What should be the remedy for those four infringements?...

Appellate courts generally defer to lower-­court fact-finding, especially when the findings are as extensive as in the GSU case. As an author of book chapters (for which I have never been paid, but which I would like students to read) and as a faculty member who posts some in-copyright materials on course websites, I’m rooting for GSU on the coming appeal. If the overwhelming majority of the university’s uses were fair, it doesn’t make sense to impose substantial and costly compliance measures on it. Colleges, students, faculty members, and academic-book-­chapter authors will win if the publishers lose once again."

GSU e-Reserves Decision; Library Journal, 5/12/16

Kyle K. Courtney, Library Journal; GSU e-Reserves Decision:

"The infamous Georgia State University (GSU) e-reserves case (Cambridge University Press v. Patton) emerged last month from its long winter slumber to give us yet another 200+ page decision which librarians, lawyers, and publishers have begun to parse and analyze. And, like me, they are probably asking themselves: What does this decision actually mean?"