Would the court have reached a different conclusion if Dr. Chickering was a college professor rather than a researcher in a for-profit corporation? As noted above, the court took great pains to limit the Texaco decision to its facts. Libraries may continue to route journals to their faculty, and their faculty may copy individual articles. But there are limits. A court might very well decide against a university if the copying is systematic, extensive, and archival—if, for example, a university library routes issues to the dozen members of the economics department, and the faculty extensively copy articles from the issues for later use. The same would hold true if the university’s license to an e-journal permitted access to a small group of faculty researchers, but copies were made available to many others by electronic messaging. Here there could be both infringement and violation of the license agreement.
The Classroom Guidelines and the ALA Model Policy
4.3. Agreement on Guidelines for
Classroom Copying in Not-for-Profit
Educational Institutions
For teachers
- Single copy for research or teaching
For students
- One copy
- Brevity and spontaneity limitations
- Cumulative effect not harmful,
But
- No anthologies, compilations, or collective works
Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides that “the fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,
the 1976 Copyright Act (rev’d April 2010), available at http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf.
Most university policies assume that a professor owns his or her scholarly work unless there is significant investment by the university. See, e.g., University of California, Office of Technology Transfer, Copyrighted Works Created at the University of California, available at http://www.ucop.edu/ott/faculty/crworks.html.
