UK May Regulate Licensed Content

By Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/15/2006

The British Academy, a national body for the advancement of humanities and social sciences, has released Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences: A British Academy Review, a report suggesting that the application of copyright law in the UK may be inhibiting the work of scholars and offering ten “recommendations” for redress, including possible government regulation of licensing deals. The report was sponsored by the European Commission.

Among the conclusions: copyright exemptions such as “fair dealing” (fair use) should “normally be sufficient for academic and scholarly use” but that “problems lie in narrow interpretation,” both by rights holders and by publishers; that copyright holders, as a result of the development of new media, “are more aggressive in seeking to maximize revenue from the rights, even if the legal basis of their claims is weak”; and that there are “well-founded” concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems “may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship.”