For those interested in copyright matters, here's a brief summary of the

May

30 meeting of the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU). Over the winter and

spring,

six working groups have been preparing draft guidelines in various areas for

copyright fair use in digital environments. May 30 was the first meeting of

the

full group in several months. It was an important opportunity for taking

stock

of where we are, and for identifying some issues of consistency among the

various sets of draft guidelines.



1. The group reaffirmed that we are working towards a November finishing

date.

The next meeting of the full group will be in early September. The small

working groups will meet as needed over the summer.



2. The group approved the final text of a letter to Congress stating that we



are making progress and also indicating when we expect to finish. In

testimony

this spring, CONFU had been depicted as disorganized and unlikely to produce

anything, and the group as a whole wanted to correct that misimpression.



3. Even though CONFU is making progress and has set November for the

expected

completion, it is not yet clear that CONFU will produce guidelines that can

win

wide acceptance. There is a separate story to be told about each of the six

areas (see below). Also, not everyone agrees that arriving at guidelines

would

in general be a good thing. A major thread in the May 30 discussion was how

to

word a common preamble for all the guidelines; this discussion turned very

much

on whether the guidelines should be seen as maxima or minima in terms of what



users can expect to do with copyrighted materials.



4. Here's a brief (and no doubt idiosyncratic) summary of the progress of

each

working group.



Multimedia. Work in this area has been led by Ivan Bender and Lisa

Livingstone

of CCUMC, the Consortium of College and University Media Centers. Their work



began even before CONFU, so these guidelines are the most fully developed.

They

focus mostly on educational rather than scholarly uses. A key feature of

these

draft guidelines is that they include fairly strict 'portion limitations' on

how

much of a piece of music or a moving image (etc.) could be used under fair

use.



Image archives. A first effort at writing guidelines was abandoned by many

participants as unproductive, and a new small group took shape around

Christmas,

with Pat Williams of the American Association of Museums is serving as

convenor.

This group has been meeting frequently since then and has made significant

progress. Originally focused on images for art history, these guidelines now



any broader scope to include (for example) medical images. A key feature of

these draft guidelines is a parsing of the problem into two parts: (a) what



could be done under fair use in terms of digitizing and using current images

currently held, such as those in slide libraries, and (b) what might be fair

use

of images originally aquired in digital form.



E-Reserves. For a time no progress was made on this topic, commercial

publishers holding that there could be no legitimate digital version of a

'reserve room.' A group of representatives from a range of not-for-profit

organizations then began meeting and has developed a complete draft. The

American Association of Publishers (AAP) has indicated that this draft is

unacceptable, and (from the other side) the Association of Research Libraries



has identified some concerns that will be discussed in July. Several other

library organizations have indicated their comfort with the draft, as have

the

Association of American University Presses and the American Council of

Learned

Societies. Kenny Crews of the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education is



the convenor. The group will collect comments through the end of July and

then

see whether to undertake any revision.



Inter-library loan and document delivery. In addition to the fair use

provisions (section 107), there are specific provisions of the copyright law

(section 108) which pertain to interlibrary loan. In this area, too, there

was

an extended period where little progress was made, particularly as the

discussion stayed very close to the current interlibrary loan practices. In

early May, AAP put forward a new, paradigm-breaking proposal. Later in May,

a

representatives of libraries met to formulate a counter proposal, also

paradigm

breaking. Time will tell if anything can come of these new ideas. There is

one

area of agreement: that it is premature to speak of guidelines for digital

delivery of digital originals; the current discussion is about digital

delivery

of analog documents (fax, Ariel, etc.). Mary Jackson of ARL is serving as

convenor.



Distance learning. Guidelines for distance learning need to take account of

section 110 of the copyright law as well as the fair use provisions. Under

the

direction of Lolly Gassaway (Association of American Universities), this

group

divided distance learning into two kinds. A draft has been completed

covering

fair use in 'traditional distance learning,' using, for example, satellite

transmission or statewide cable networks. Barely broached is the question of



what guidelines might be appropriate for the next generation of distance

learning, using computer networks and individual student workstations for

digital delivery and receipt of materials.



Software use in libraries. There was an early agreement in this area not to

write guidelines but rather only to write scenarios. There is a

close-to-final

draft which has been the work of Mark Traphagen (Software Publishers Assoc.)

and

Sally Wiant (Special Libraries Assoc.).



Music materials. A group met in April to consider whether there should be

guidelines for the fair use of music materials in degital environments. They



decided that current guidelines (formulated in the 1970s) were sufficient.