March 2020
Public Statement of Library Copyright Specialists: Fair Use & Emergency Remote Teaching & Research (13 March 2020)(https://tinyurl.com/tvnty3a). - Can you teach a college course without access to a library? As university teaching shifts to online learning, the resources of now-closed libraries must also move online. Thanks to the huge amounts that libraries spend on licensed electronic resources, many items are available remotely to faculty and students. Many more items, however, are not accessible in digital form. Fortunately, those items can also be used when the proposed use is a fair use. To help librarians and educators think about the copyright issues involved with online teaching, a group of copyright "lawyerbrarians" prepared this statement. School Library Journal has noted that the statement's analysis of copyright law would apply to K-12 education as well. The Internet Archive's National Emergency Library is an even more aggressive assertion of fair use. It has generated some opposition from rightsholders, but to date no legal action. - PH