Kenneth D Crews Charleston Conference 2018 Penthouse Suite Interview

My pleasure.

Well, I was wondering, because I was looking at your CV and I believe you got your law degree before you went and got your library degree. Whatever sent you into the world of libraries?

Thanks, glad to share it.

I just lie there thinking fantasies about copyright. Do I do that? Sure, who wouldn't? I'll answer it in a really good way. What's exciting about copyright and drew me into it initially was I was a writer, and it was writings and books and things like that, libraries, all those concepts from the good old days of the universe. But where else can you spend your scholarly and professional time ultimately dealing with these legal concepts and all the equations and the nuances that they have, but deal with them in the context of art and literature and music and computer programming? What fun is that? Out there in TV land, they're enjoying every second of this. So there's the positive. I find it all very exciting and very energizing. But what keeps me awake at night in a negative way, what disturbs my sleep when I should be dreaming about all these nicer things, is thinking about ultimately how to reconstruct copyright. Because a lot of what I do in my style and the things I focus on is I work with different communities, visiting college and university campuses, spending a day meeting with different groups. One way I often describe it is helping people be law-abiding citizens while at the same time being openly critical about this thing we call copyright, because it deserves a lot of criticism. But it is something we have to learn to live with. So how are we going to see change in the law that goes in a direction that's ultimately helpful to rights holders, helpful to the public, helpful to researchers and libraries, and ultimately gives us a construct of the law that earns our respect and our ability to really understand what it's expecting of us, and makes us want to do it because it's ultimately for the public good as well as simultaneously for the private good? That's a big challenge.

I'd be happy to. One of the things I work with authors to recognize and grasp is that they are copyright owners. If you write that piece of poetry or research chemistry article, whatever it might be, you are under normal circumstances a copyright owner of that work, which means at that moment you've got the power, you've got the ability to say yes or no to proceed with publishing, and decide what terms are acceptable to you. So I encourage people to be critical, to ask for things as part of the negotiating process with a publisher. At the bare minimum, if not hold back the copyright, which can be real or just cosmetic, ultimately what's important is that the rights holder, the author, think ahead and ask a really practical, non-legal question: I've written this work, what might I want to do with it in the future? Republish it somewhere, post it to my website, include it in a book that I'm going to write next year. What might I want to do with it in the future? Realistically hold on to those rights, get them in the agreement, and have that written down as an addendum or a revision so that whatever rights go to the publisher, at least that set of specific rights comes back to you. Chances are, the more specific that list, the less the publisher is really going to be concerned. They'll say, 'Oh yeah, you want specific uses one, two, and three? We weren't going to do that either, so you go ahead and keep those.' The more specific you can be in the negotiations about what you hold back, the more likely the publisher is going to agree to those.

Strategy number one: do not hesitate to ask. Just don't hesitate. I've had numerous conversations where somebody explains that they don't ask because they say, 'Oh, it's a standard form, you can't change those things anyway.' That is not true. Or, 'Publishers never give into that.' That is not true. Or a fear that if I raise these points, the publisher might withdraw the invitation to publish. If somebody out there has had that experience, please write to me and share it with me, because so far I've not seen that happen. And if it does happen, I'd seriously question whether that publisher was the right one for you anyway. So the upshot is, don't hesitate to ask. Another little secret from inside the publishing world: at that moment, by the time they get to the point where they've extended an offer to you as an author, the publisher probably thinks that he or she has invested more in this written work than you as the author have invested. They probably feel more invested. Now that may or may not be true, it doesn't matter whether it's true, they feel that way. So they're not going to walk out on you. The worst they may say if you ask for something in the contract is, 'No, we don't do that.' That's about the worst you're going to get. So you still have the basic agreement that's been offered to you, you can still decide whether you want to accept that or move on to publish it in some other way. So don't hesitate to ask. On the other side of the spectrum, I've seen many instances where an author says, 'I went to this session, I watched this television program, and I learned that I want to ask for these things, so I'm asking for it.' And a publisher will say, 'We know exactly what you're talking about. We've had this before. Here is our secret contract Plan B that we save for people who ask.' So we're willing to go along with these terms, and you look it over and maybe it's acceptable and better than Plan A, and you proceed to sign that. I've seen that on many, many occasions. Do not hesitate to ask.

I think that's right. You can call it power, you can call it whatever you want. To put it in more neutral terms, they have more options than they realize. It isn't just 'I have to go along with the standard formula.' You have real options as an author. I think that's a better way to put it: you have options.

No, there are some real surprises. Let's start at the beginning. No matter what audience I'm speaking to, when I have more than just a focused presentation, when I'm giving the overview, I really have to start at the beginning. Maybe I only give the beginning about one or two minutes, I make it compressed and tight and quickly get to the more focused stuff, but I always have to start at the beginning because it's a surprise to a lot of people to discover that they are already copyright owners. It's the most fundamental aspect of copyright. In every presentation, there will be somebody in that audience who is thinking, and I know because they'll ask it during the session or afterward, 'But I found this on the internet, so it's okay, isn't it?' Or, 'I wrote that paper last year and I want to publish it, but I never registered it, I never did anything, so I lost my copyright, right?' Or, 'How do I get a copyright?' All of these are different ways of not understanding the fact that copyright today is instant and automatic, and has been for decades, but that news has not reached a high percentage of people who really need to have that bit of information. So you're a copyright owner from the moment you create that work under any typical situation. So there's that. Then there are some other fun surprises. The fact that music, for example, is treated so differently under the copyright law, not only this quasi-copyright we talked about today about pre-1972 recordings and how it works, that's a very strange set of laws that we're still figuring out, it's all brand new. But why do we have 2,000 recorded versions of 'Louie Louie'? The reason is because the copyright law says that once that has been recorded, an authorized recording that has been released by sale or distribution to the public, then the next recording artist has the right to make a recording. Now that might be just a negotiating starting point to get a better deal, but even without negotiation, has the right to record. So that version of 'Louie Louie' that we all know by The Kingsmen was far and away not the first recording. It took multiple versions to get to the point where there was the version that the public was ready to latch on to. That's a really important phenomenon because music is a matter of taste, a matter of style, a matter of taking the same work and recasting it in many different ways. I mentioned the example in the talk today of 'I Fought the Law' by the Bobby Fuller Four, but many people in the audience probably know the version by The Clash, a slightly later version, 20 years later. There are many other versions. Years go by and there's a new version of it that is appealing to a new audience, and they're both very exciting songs, and they add to our social benefit, the aesthetic benefit of having access not only to the song and to the recording, but access to a fresh version of it. So we get to decide. I could tell you a few more. Let me give you one that's big and conceptual: a surprise under the law is that there is better protection under US law for foreign works than for domestic works. Under our current law, you get better protection. A lot of works that went into the public domain for lack of formalities when formalities were required in the early part of the 20th century were restored, but only the foreign works were restored. And you have to register your copyright with the US Copyright Office before filing a lawsuit against somebody, it's kind of a formality step. However, you don't have to do that if it's a foreign work, so they can go straight into court. All of these subtle differences between domestic and foreign works are rooted in different interpretations and applications of the big multinational treaties that we've entered into, and how we need to extend certain protections above a certain level to these foreign works that we don't have to extend to US works if we don't want to under those agreements. So there are a lot of oddities out there in the law. We could spend an hour talking just about this.

It's there, a brain worm.

Fair use. Fair use, far and away. We could talk endlessly about fair use. But let me also say Section 108, the statutory exception for the benefit of libraries. It's very easy for us to be critical of Section 108, that's an easy game, target-rich environment as they might say in Washington. It's very easy because it only covers certain activities like preservation and single copies of works for users. It doesn't cover data mining, it doesn't cover a lot of other issues. So it's very easy to be critical of this law. But that said, by comparison to other laws, it's pretty darn good. For what it sets out to do, and it allows libraries to make uses of copyrighted works for these limited purposes under these limited circumstances, it does it pretty well. A smart, careful reader can read that statute and know what to do, can picture what the statute is allowing. For better or for worse, it on the whole works pretty well. But it doesn't, as you say, it's easy to be critical. So there are movements, and I support them, to revise or amend or supplement Section 108, and that's a good thing. I'm working with WIPO in Geneva to help people around the world understand the pros and cons of their different statutes and copyright laws around the world, and help WIPO move forward as this consortium of 191 countries move forward to address the issues on an international basis.

We do, we do. Let me put it in context. I mentioned already these two issues that are very prominent in the US statute: copies for preservation and replacement in the collections, and single copies of relatively short works like a single chapter or a single article to give to the user for their research and study. By the way, we also have statutes that allow the whole work under certain circumstances, but conceptually the topics are preservation, replacement, and single copies of works for research and study, private research and study. Those are far and away the most common topics addressed in statutes around the world, whether they do it very succinctly or in long elaborate provisions. Then when you get to the next most common of the purely library service kind of activities, document supply and interlibrary loan, the numbers drop off considerably, drop off really rapidly. Then when you get to the modern issues of orphan works and data mining and text mining, you're down to some of those in the single digits. If it weren't for the activity of the European Union and directives that applied to its 28 members, you wouldn't have 28 countries adopting certain types of provisions. So the European Union has been a big push in all of this. So the US statute fits in with a lot of those patterns. Let me explain another way that it kind of fits into a global perspective. This may come as a shock to you, of course we are here in South Carolina, so this won't be too much of a shock: we are a former British colony. I know that's a surprise. It's really fun when I give presentations in other parts of the world and I say, 'By the way, we share something with you, Sierra Leone or whatever, we're both former British colonies.' One of the things that we got was the British legal system. It's not just that we got the British legal system from 1783 when we signed the treaty and ended the Revolutionary War, but we still borrow from the British system and borrow a lot from them. The British Copyright Act of 1956, can you picture that? That was a long time after Benjamin Franklin and all that activity. In 1956, the British statute included a library exception. It was the first one, and it covered preservation and single copies for users. We borrowed a lot of the concept and some of that language and made it more suited to the context of the US market, the US activity. But we started with that. Then you look around the world and you can see big and small, from Australia to St. Kitts, big countries and little countries that have borrowed this British model and made it a little bit their own. But you read the statute and you go, 'I know exactly where this came from,' and that helps me better understand the American statute too, that we kept borrowing from our closest ally in the world. Do I dare say that? Maybe I think so. But everybody in Canada right now is watching this, I'm sorry. I'll rethink that.

It tells us a lot. I'll be careful, I need to preface anything I say about the Georgia State case. Number one, it's still going on, so whatever the date is today, at some date in the future we may have something different to say about it because we're not done with this case yet. Second, I'm in the game because I was the expert witness retained by the university parties, working with them on these fair use questions, and I testified at length during the trial back in 2011. So it's important for everybody to understand that context. But as much as there's a little bit of head-scratching going on right now about this latest ruling that came down just last month, making sure we remember where we are here and now, that was October of 2018, we had another decision from the 11th Circuit that addressed a few points related to fair use. But you take that and bundle it with all of the other decisions to say, on the whole, where are we going? We're pretty much where I think we expect it to be. There's a bit of confusion right now about understanding some of the four factors. But on the ground, if you were to rephrase the question and say, 'Is there anything I can use in this set of decisions for rethinking my fair use policy at my university?' My answer is absolutely yes. There are a lot of things we can learn. Let's go back to the four factors. The court rulings very clearly have pushed aside those old 1976 word count kind of guidelines. I think we can safely say, as a matter of law in light of the rulings from this Georgia State case and supported by other developments, that colleges and universities all over the country can look at their policy and if they have those 1976 guidelines with the counting of a thousand words or whatever, they can just set that aside and go back to the four factors, because that's really what these decisions are fussing over: what's the meaning of these four factors, and that's what fair use really is. So go back to those four factors. That first factor, the purpose of the use, is for most of our nonprofit educational institutions going to be strongly favored. The nature of the work, the courts in the Georgia State decisions have opened up the fact that this is a relatively neutral factor because any kind of work is suited for education, so the nature of the work shouldn't make that much of a difference. The amount is still out for debate, so we can pick up a few lessons from some of the earlier decisions about keeping the amount tightly focused on the educational objectives and other variables like that. Then the fourth factor is the effect on the market, and I think that's where the 11th Circuit is still trying to push for clarification from the district court to be able to say, 'You need to reconsider how much weight to give to that fourth factor in the overall analysis.' That's where I think there's still a lot out for play right now in this case and its implications for other factors, because you really don't analyze each of the four factors in total isolation. A tweak in one can affect something in the other. So we still have to figure out overall what this means.

I think so, and confirm some of the things we already knew. There's still a lot that's come out of this case, and we know it's really based on the four factors. Let me say something that's also a little bit about what I have at play. One of the issues was the appropriateness of the role of a so-called fair use checklist in all this. I'm happy to say that the fair use checklist is not even mentioned in this latest ruling. It didn't need to be, because the checklist and the law are really about those four factors. The checklist is just a tool to help you focus on those four factors. So go back to those four factors, we have to figure out what each one means, and then figure out what they mean in relationship to each other, and bring that forward as a determination of fair use. Then as a practical matter on the ground, learn some of those lessons about first factor, nonprofit, etc., all these things that we've been saying, and articulate them as a policy document to be able to say, 'As a result, as an institution, here is where we feel it is appropriate, and we feel comfortable moving forward with fair use for this kind of use, of this much of an excerpt, from this kind of work, for serving the needs of our students.'

More broadly, I'm very encouraged. I think that courts have done some really exciting things with fair use in making sure that they extend it out to different types of works. In particular, we've got some really important decisions about the use of visual images. One of my favorite cases for making different points about fair use is the case involving this big coffee table size book that's about the Grateful Dead. It all comes back to rock and roll. This book about the Grateful Dead, the lawsuit involved the appropriateness of infringement versus fair use of including some of these psychedelic rock and roll artistic posters from the 1960s and 70s, and the court said that's fair use. That was a decision from 2006, and we've had a number of other kinds of decisions since then. But I dare say that if that case had been before that same court 10 years before, I wouldn't expect it to be fair use. What's happened is the courts have become more flexible about concepts of amount, because it's the whole poster, darn it. Normally 100% of a work doesn't look like fair use, but the court made very clear that amount can be measured in many ways. It can be measured in terms of size on the page, even though it's all four corners of the original work, or it can be measured in terms of pixelation and low resolution as a concept of amount. This is very exciting because it reflects the realities of the way we use works, create and use works, and it also reflects the reality of being able to move fair use in a fresh, exciting new direction. Can I give you another case that isn't nearly as dramatic? It involves Bloomberg News and a commercial entity very clearly. Corporations that are publicly held companies run these financial advisory sessions, and they do it by telephone and conference call dial-in. Bloomberg News recorded the whole darn thing for this publicly held company and put it in their database and made it searchable. Well, that was against the kind of good faith rules of the session not to be recorded and certainly not to be published. The court ruled that that was fair use. There's a strong public interest in having access to that information. It was 100% of the work, they recorded the whole phone call and made it available by a commercial entity about a commercial development, and the court said that's fair use. That's very exciting and shows that the courts are adapting the law to meet changing needs, to meet diversity of works, and to meet diverse kinds of interests. The notion of a public interest in the finances of that publicly traded stock is very different from the public interest in learning from a book of the history of music.

In many ways it is. The court, I think a judge deciding those cases would say, 'No, we don't expand the law. What we do is we discover through time and through opportunity how it does apply. It was just waiting for this opportunity.' That's the theory of the law. But for us as mere civilians watching this happen and learning from it, we would look at it and we would all probably conclude that yeah, this is revealing to us how the law does expand. It's not necessarily bigger in that simplified kind of sense, but it's expanding in terms of its applicability to new situations and diverse kinds of materials.

It does, and I think that's true. We still have some work to do. I listened to one of the oral arguments in the Georgia State case, and I had a sense that one of those judges couldn't picture what this e-reserves thing was really doing. But let me push it back further. I remember in a software case, talking with somebody who was working on the case and working with the clerks with the judge on a case that was before the court back in the early 1990s. They realized that the judge was not picturing what they were trying to explain, so they brought in for the judge a computer and a monitor and showed him. The judge just kind of held his fingers a few inches above the keyboard and just sort of envisioned what it might be like to actually touch this. It's kind of like magic. If you remember in those dark old days, it's 1983 when I got my first computer, you kids weren't even born yet. Your imagination runs wild, you really wonder, 'Will smoke come out of this?' Did his imagination run wild? I think it did. They had to demonstrate to the judge what software is and how it works and what computers actually do. We're a long way from that, and that wasn't so long ago.

This will help you. You think of more questions while I'm going on and on. My students figure this out right away, they just throw me a question and I talk for 10 minutes and they get to take a break, have lunch, read their text messages, play a couple solitaire hands. So one of the... not now, I forgot what I was going to say.

I'm being philosophical. It is astounding. We have to realize that when the Gutenberg press was invented, it took maybe a hundred years before the first artifact of it reached a couple of countries away. And we have to realize that in the span of just a few years, we went from not only having something vastly more powerful than the Gutenberg press on our desks at home, now in our pockets, and that we can create works that are vastly more complicated and share them instantly all over the world. We need to step back. Anybody who is of adult age and realize we have lived through a phenomenal, radical revolution. For better or for worse, it has happened, and it's going to be even more revolutionary in the future. This is barely the beginning of this revolution.

The answer is always that there's something. If your question were slightly different, 'Are there court cases that are specifically about education, specifically about libraries?' The answer is not many, because the way of litigation is that even if it gets to the point where somebody is threatening litigation, very often parties in all fields generally find that it's just weighing us down, it's time for us to really think of some kind of settlement resolution. That's the direction that most litigation of all types will take. But along the way, we do get some hints of different things. There was a case several years ago brought against UCLA involving digitizing of audiovisual materials and making them available, which ran into all kinds of contractual and some constitutional issues about suing a state agency, so we never got to the copyright issues. But it kind of reminded us of who's out there and what the parties are that have something at stake, and that there's something there that we need to be considering. Then we still have questions about... there's a case, as shocking as it might sound that this kind of case would get to the US Supreme Court, there's a case before the US Supreme Court right now, so we should have a decision next spring I would guess, involving the question of registration of a work on a timely basis to get the various benefits including filing the lawsuit. Do we need to register? Does the registration need to be complete, or does it all need to be submitted? Or do you have to have the answer back from the Copyright Office? The courts have split on that question, and when there are split decisions from different courts, that's the kind of thing the Supreme Court likes to pick up. We're seeing the Supreme Court get into copyright more and more. We had the decision a couple of years ago involving the design of cheerleader uniforms. That's a big business, there's a lot of money at stake because cheerleader uniforms are bought by every high school, junior high, and college all over the country. There was a lawsuit over the design of those, and is it protectable? The design that's in the front of a familiar cheerleader outfit, because normally clothing designs are not protectable even if there's something new that you include in that design, because clothing is generally regarded as functional and functional works are not protectable under copyright. But the pattern design, the artistic pattern design, can be copyrighted. So is that cheerleader design integral to the design of the clothing and functional, or is it separable and therefore an artistic creation? The court said that if it can be even conceptually separable, so even if the article of clothing falls apart if you remove the design, it can be conceptually separable, the court ruled, and therefore it can be protectable by copyright. So there's just a lot of activity in different areas. Who knew we'd talk about cheerleader uniforms? Well, I didn't know we'd be talking about 'Louie Louie' either.

Trust me, you can, and it has been done.

It gets into this real subtle aspect. If ResearchGate or other kind of organization, however it is in real life, if we could construct it as just the pipeline, just the mere conduit for the exchange of different information like an email system, and you attach an article and send it to your colleagues, the email system is a mere conduit and there are general protections, takedown notices, and so on, definitely under American law and I think something comparable under European law, that gives some protection for the conduit. But if there's protection for the mere conduit, that doesn't necessarily protect the individuals who are passing the works around. So there's good news and bad news in that arrangement. Now if it's more like a repository, like your question, where the work is going in and sitting there, in a typical repository as I'm sure many of our viewers are well familiar with if they're associated with any kind of educational institution, there's probably a repository. There has always been a need for that repository to take some steps to provide whatever reasonable level of protection against copyright infringement. So what we really need to make this work the way it's supposed to is a bundle of related activities to all happen at the same time. One is this open-source movement, and back to the very first question you asked about authors and their agreements with publishers and retaining rights. Part of retaining rights is so that you can put that work into your repository and that it's allowed under the contract. That's an important part of feeding into the open access movement. Then that work goes into the repository. Ask any manager or director of the repository at an institution, 'Do you have the wherewithal and the staffing to investigate individually every one of these works?' Most of them would probably say no, I would guess. But I know that there are some that are operating at a scale where they at least can do a perusal look at the Sherpa/Romeo website, for example, and see generally for Journal X, Y, and Z, it's okay. Maybe I didn't get the 100% definitive answer, what exactly did you sign, but I know generally what you signed. The goal is to try to bring it in closer and closer to having the right answer, which is another way of saying we're reducing and reducing the risks associated with it. A big part of it, I mentioned earlier in this interview, is doing the right thing, being good citizens. A big part of it is helping people be good citizens as they understand their agreement, as they understand what they have, and as they check that box that a repository will often have that says, 'Do you affirm that you have the right and that you haven't transferred this right over to the publisher and not reserved the right to include it in your local repository?' We need to help people understand more fully that as authors, they're in a real special position. The law has given them a big bundle of rights. Please don't squander it. Enter into agreements wisely, hold back certain rights of use, understand what you have, check the box in an honest, informed manner. Is there risk at the end of that process? Of course, there's risk in everything we do, right now sitting in this room. But we have to find the formula that lets us move forward in a reasonable, informed, and productive manner.

That's right. It takes me back to when I do those sessions in the room. I know there's always somebody who has a misunderstanding of rule number one of copyright: what does it apply to and how do I get it? So education goes a long way to solving a lot of these concerns.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Isn't that true? Can I say something about that right now? I'll do my best to keep it brief. At the end of that whole process, as an author working with a publisher, negotiate, sign, whatever, keep a copy of whatever you sign. Even if you didn't sign something, because a lot of publications are just kind of done on the figurative or even literal handshake, keep a copy of the emails. Hit the print key, because digital doesn't last forever. Put it in your permanent file. So that shows, 'Yeah, I want to publish your article, great, I want to send you my article,' and that there was no other agreement, it was just that. That's important for us to know because people come to me, as I'm sure both of you have experienced too, an author will come to me and say, 'I published this article 10 years ago, I now want to update it, revise it for publication, or put it in a book. Can I do that?' My answer begins, 'Let's take a look at what you signed.' You can kind of script the conversation from there. The first response is usually, 'I don't remember, that was 10 years ago,' or 'I signed something and I sent it back and I didn't keep a copy,' or 'I had a copy but I moved offices five years ago and we threw away all those files.' All of these documents that I just described, starting with the agreements, you need to keep. You need to have a permanent file, not like your income taxes where you keep records for seven years or whatever. No, copyrights last for the rest of your life plus 70 years. You need to keep that file for the rest of your life plus 70 more years. That's the evidence we need 100 years from now when the question comes up about copyright ownership.

Great question. I'm going to dare to give you a suggestion. The year now is 2018. 20 years ago was 1998, that was the DMCA, that was the Copyright Term Extension Act. Both of those were enacted by Congress in October of 1998. In October of 2018, 20 years later almost to the day, we get the Music Modernization Act and we get the Marrakesh Treaty. I see two things that clue us in about the direction we're heading. We're only connecting a few dots here, there aren't many to connect. I see the growth in significance of international developments, and this is now going to be played out in trade agreements. NAFTA revisited is on the table right now. Don't ask me in detail what's there, I've glanced at it, we'll come back to it another day, but it has a lot of IP-related provisions. It is stepping up what needs to be enacted. Maybe even some changes in US law will be required, definitely some changes in Canadian and probably Mexican law will be required. So we're going to see more and more of these issues played out and decided by the negotiators of multinational agreements, then brought back to our Congress and brought back to the legislatures of other countries to say, 'There isn't much you can do but enact this because it's already locked in, and we have to go back to those other countries and get everybody to agree, and that's just not going to happen.' So a lot of the negotiation of the future of intellectual property is being deferred to diplomats and trade representatives from multiple countries meeting to negotiate this. The other thing I think we're going to see, connecting a few dots, is the trend toward statutory provisions that read and look much more like regulatory provisions and negotiated consortia agreements. By that I mean, in the Music Modernization Act, something that's not terribly important to libraries, but the bulk of it, probably the most significant for more people, is going to be these licensing provisions about digital broadcast and about the new recorded versions of existing works and the compulsory licenses for that. They read like the agreements that come out of negotiations among large groups of stakeholders in an industry. I think we're going to see more and more law look like that, where Congress will turn to the stakeholders in the industry and say, 'You need to tell us what this language is,' and we're going to get some long, complicated language, which is what we're getting in our lives today.

Let me build on what I just said, because a lot of our future law, our current law and our future law, will look more and more like negotiated language. Be a negotiator. In other words, I would say to our library professionals, now more than ever, you need to be not only attuned and watchful and responsible and implement, but you need to get involved. You need to be at the bargaining table, because if you're not, somebody else will be, and that somebody else may not share your interests. So be at the bargaining table, get involved. Because if Congress gets in its mind that maybe we need to enact a statute on electronic reserves or overhaul the way we address uses in education, it's going to look like a negotiated big site license. Get involved and make sure that your voice is heard and address every detail of that negotiation as it comes down the pike for you.

That's even better, it's an interview question actually for jobs. Let me offer up one. There are so many, but let me offer up one. We're in the library field, and we know that probably a lot of our viewers out there are going to be in the library field. What's the appropriate role of that library copyright officer, the professional who has been designated by the library to take up copyright-related duties? This is a challenge today, and I think it's only going to be a continuing and growing challenge. What I'm getting at is what I've seen over the years of working with different universities and libraries on many of these issues: it is increasingly a legal issue. Obviously copyright is rooted in the law, but it's becoming addressed more as a legal issue in various ways, concepts of liability, concerns about liability. What do we need to do to further our interest as researchers, as teachers, as librarian and information professionals? What do we need to do to advance all of that while, frankly, at the same time making sure we don't get ourselves, our institution, and our colleagues in a lot of trouble that we don't need? So how do we address these issues in a very legal way, where many of our library and information copyright professionals do have that legal background and are doing that, but some don't? They need to, whether they have a legal background or not, think about how closely they partner with their higher-ups, including general counsel, and make them part of the periodic conversation to make sure we're all addressing these things together. Also, one of the things that every time a library director says, 'I'm going to carve out this position, we're going to fill it,' usually on the very short list of priorities for that position is educating faculty. This is a big challenge, because when you convene that meeting with faculty, a lot of them aren't there. We all know the dynamic, they're just not there. We need them to be there and be a part of a conversation about these issues, because then what often happens is that faculty member will contact the copyright officer later and say, 'I'm sorry I couldn't be at the meeting last month, but I have these questions, can you come over and help me with it?' What it ends up looking like, whether that's intended or not, is 'I'm just looking for some legal advice, I've got the issue here and now, can you get me through this?' That's perfectly understandable, but it also should make everybody a little bit cautious. These offices, the pressure on these offices is to be the university-paid legal counsel for the individuals, and it just can't be that. They need to be in a position to educate people to make their own decisions and to handle it themselves, and bring a little bit of copyright into that faculty behavior and faculty decision-making.

It's something for all of us to be aware of and to be on the lookout for.

Well, my thanks to you.