E-copyright Handbook

The E-copyright Handbook provides library and information professionals with practical guidance to minimize the risk of copyright infringement. This book considers how copyright applies to a wide range of electronic content types including; APIs, e-books, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, e-mails, streaming, podcasts, broadcasts, databases, social networking sites and GUIs. Author Paul Pedley looks at activities which are especially relevant to library and information services such as the lending of electronic content and the mass digitization of content from a library collection, and considers activities undertaken by internet users such as deep linking, filesharing, mashups, and scraping; and the copyright issues associated with those activities. The text draws upon relevant legislation as well as numerous examples of legal disputes and court decisions both from the UK, Europe, and the USA. An entire chapter is devoted to the Digital Economy Act 2010 and how it works in practice through the use of copyright infringement reports, copyright infringement lists, quality assurance reports; as well as the use of technical measures, penalties, appeals, and costs. It also sets out a series of practical measures libraries can undertake in order to comply with the Act. Copyright exceptions such as those for fair dealing, library privilege, the making of a temporary copy, visual impairment, and the public interest are all considered, and how they apply in an electronic context is explained. The handbook looks at licences for e-content such as Creative Commons, open access, and the open government licence; as well as the range of microlicensing solutions available through registries such as ARROW, standards for permissions such as ACAP, and services such as Rightslink and iCopyright. The book also considers the way in which rights are enforced, both from the point of view of protecting your own content; and also rightsowners enforcing their rights where people have made use of third party content without permission. The section on enforcement covers technological protection measures; notice and takedown; Norwich Pharmacal Orders; extradition; fines and prosecutions; and the existence of copyright trolls. The final chapter examines the findings of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth which included proposals for a Digital Licensing Exchange, a solution to the problem posed by orphan works, regulation of the collecting societies, and the expansion of the copyright exceptions to cover activities such as text mining, limited private copying, parody, library preservation and archiving.