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I want to warmly welcome our first guest blogger, Peg O'Donnell, to Collectanea! She practices in the General Counsel's Office at Catholic University, just a few metro stops down the road from UMUC and the Center for Intellectual Property. Peg's practice is quite a bit broader than mine. Catholic's legal office is small so everyone handles many legal subjects, but she has nevertheless become quite the copyright expert! She's also the creative force behind one of the best University legal office Web sites. She's going to be our guest for the month of March, so please visit frequently as, between the two of us, we'll be posting twice as often.

Thank you Georgia, for the warm welcome to the world of blogging. While I am used to creating and updating web pages and publishing newsletters online, this is my first attempt at blogging.

When Georgia (who has taught me much of what I know about copyright) suggested that I become a guest blogger, I was at first a bit dubious. Despite being of the 21st century, I do spend most of the day at work tethered to a computer. In an attempt to lead a balanced life, at home I read my New York Times in print, use a fountain pen, mail letters with hard copies of photos to my Mom (not digital) and most of all read books in their analog format. So, I wondered about blogging and whether it would be a source of information that I wanted to add to my list.

Once I started to read Georgia's Lifelong Learning Blog I realized I could really have fun with the world of blogging. In my next post I will write about some of the great information sources I have learned about from Georgia's blogging.

Peg O'Donnell has been graciously sharing her time and her insights with us this month as the Collectanea guest blogger, and I want to thank her for taking the plunge and trying this out. She's our first guest and she's established "guesting" as a very positive feature of what Collectanea has to offer.

Blogging is an art actually, and not one that everyone takes to. But I've had a lot of fun with it and I'm happy to see that Peg seems to have enjoyed it too. I'm also happy to say that Peg has agreed to stay on as an occasional contributor, so do look for her posts from time to time as something irresistibly sharable crosses her path.

So, thank you very much Peg! I do so appreciate your having joined me here for the month of March, and I look forward to hearing more from you as the year in copyright unfolds.

Georgia

As Peg said last week as she bid us farewell, Steve McDonald, General Counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD, as it's known, will be our guest blogger for April. I want to welcome Steve today, and I look forward to hearing Steve's take on events, and seeing more than just a glimpse of Steve's great sense of humor mixed in with the more serious fare that we've come to expect when the subject is copyright!

Steve is very involved in our National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA), Cornell's Institute for Computer Policy and Law (ICPL), and The Stetson Conference on Law and Higher Education, among others. Given his many commitments in addition to his RISD responsibilities, we are very honored to have Steve as our guest. Welcome, Steve!

I just learned that Steve McDonald, our guest blogger this month, and General Counsel at Rhode Island School of Design, will be honored by our National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA) by being named a Fellow of the Association. This award is given to members of NACUA, from time to time, to recognize exemplary service over an extended time by individuals who have brought distinction to the practice of law on behalf of college and university clients, whether through the quality of their scholarship, the breadth of their service, or through other means. Steve certainly qualifies on all counts! Congratulations Steve!

Steve, I can hardly believe that it's been an entire month since you joined us here at Collectanea. I have so enjoyed your contributions and comments. I hope you've had as much fun blogging as I have. Please feel free to drop in from time to time. We'll always be happy to hear from you again, as a contributor, or as a commenter. See you around!

Georgia

It's a good thing titles can't be copyrighted, because I happen to like this one and the book to which it is attached, and it seemed to fit. (If you don't recognize it, it's the title of the fourth of the five books in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", which may explain something about my sense of humor.)

Anyway, I want to thank Georgia for having invited me to participate over this past month. Like Peg O'Donnell, my predecessor in guest bloggery, I've found it to be both educational and a lot of fun.

Before I pass the baton on, I'd like to post one more international note, to Georgia: I'm glad to see that France, your imminent destination, escaped largely unscathed in this year's Special 301 Report, save for some minor chiding about its preference for interoperability over digital rights management.

Bons voyages, and, in addition to the bibliotheques, don't forget the bouquinistes, bistros, brasseries, and boulangeries!

I now have the pleasure of introducing our May guest blogger, Lolly Gasaway! Lolly is one of the first people I met in my early career as a university copyright attorney who encouraged me along in what was at the time a fairly lonely field. If you practiced copyright law, you didn't generally have colleagues in the same state, let alone the same town, for example. As Director of University of North Carolina's Law Library and a faculty member jointly appointed to both the Library and Law Schools, Lolly's path crossed mine early on where copyright and libraries were concerned. She was and continues to be a great source of support and wisdom. Not coincidentally, a conversation I had with her in January of last year led directly to my decision to get my library degree.

Today Lolly is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and very much involved in the intersection of libraries and copyright. She is one of the participants in the Library of Congress' Section 108 Study Group, to which she will make important contributions, I'm sure.

For the month of May, she'll be joining me here at Collectanea, so we all can benefit from her point of view, what catches her eye, what news she thinks we ought to know about in the world of copyright and libraries. Welcome, Lolly.

Lolly, it has been such a pleasure to have you here with us through the month of May. I have enjoyed reading your posts, and I'm sure our readers have too. I hope you'll drop back by from time to time -- you will always be welcomed. You have such a unique perspective given your background in the Law Library, your work with the Library of Congress and your years of teaching experience.

But for now it is time to say good bye and wish you a very good summer. I hope you'll have some time to relax a bit and slow down! Thanks again!

Georgia

I am happy to announce that we have a guest blogger for August. Tobe Liebert is a friend of mine who, until recently, worked at the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was assistant director for collection development and taught an advanced legal research class in intellectual property. While at Tarlton, he created the "Current Copyright Literature" service, which recently received an award from the American Association of Law Libraries. Tobe has an undergraduate degree in history from Centre College of Kentucky, a law degree from the University of Kentucky and a Masters of Library Science from Indiana University at Bloomington. He currently lives in Chicago. He's taking advantage of his move to spend summer with his two girls. This sounds to me like the perfect way to spend a summer. I'm so pleased that he can join us, so please welcome Tobe!

I would like to thank Tobe, our August guest blogger, for sharing his thoughts about copyright events with us. The end of August and Tobe's month with us marks as well, the end of summer. Tobe has a new job teaching legal writing and legal research at the John Marshall law school in Chicago (congratulations, Tobe!). I, of course, am back to school as well, but as student rather than teacher. My classes got rolling last week. I'm already way over my head in reading assignments, project due dates and ideas for papers I won't have time to write...

So, thanks Tobe, and the best of luck to you in your new home and your new job! Keep in touch!

I am pleased to introduce our September guest blogger, fellow UT School of Information (iSchool) grad student, Carlos Ovalle. Carlos and I have known each other many years, as the result of his interest in copyright law. In fact, his dissertation topic will center on copyright law. In addition to his work at the iSchool where, among other things, he created a wonderful copyright module that students use in their studies, he's also an ALA Copyright Scholar, class of 2005, and blogs on the Copyright Advisory Network's blog as well as his own blog, copy this blog.

I look forward to reading Carlos' take on things over the next several weeks, and am sure you'll enjoy seeing his perspective too. He is among the bright scholars whose interest in these topics will carry them far, and help out the rest of us! Thanks for joining us Carlos.

September has flown by and it's time to say goodbye to Carlos. Thanks for contributing your insights to our discussion! Carlos regularly blogs at Copy this blog, so we can continue to follow him there. Also, Carlos, if the mood strikes you, you can always contribute here in the future. Thanks again!

We are very lucky to have as our guest blogger this month, Peggy Hoon, librarian lawyer from North Carolina State University. I've been privileged to work with Peggy on a number of task forces; we have shared the podium for panel discussions; and always enjoyed each other's company at Nacua gatherings (Nacua is our National Association of College and University Attorneys). Peggy has also been very active with the ARL in developing a series of copyright education initiatives, such as Know Your Copyrights. I am sure you will enjoy hearing Peggy's take on events as they unfold this month. Welcome, Peggy!

In the last week or so I have been reading about the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 that now contains a provision that would "require all institutions eligible for financial aid under Title IV to develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or P2P distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity." EDUCAUSE Talking points. Also in their talking points, EDUCAUSE states that this practice "could represent a transfer of over $400 million annually from higher education to the entertainment industry while raising the cost of higher education."

I have heard various quotes about how small a part of the overall file-sharing problem is represented by college students. The lion's share of the problem is off-campus, in the "grown-up", world on commercial internets. Why don't we hear legislation pertaining to them? Why focus on such a small part of the problem? Why ignore the elephant in the room? Why sue a 13-year old girl for crying out loud!?!

At my university, (one of the 25 named bad guys) efforts to inform students about the illegalities of most of their P2P file-trading activities are pretty extensive (comparatively speaking; also consume lots of worker's time and energy), yet it's hard to judge how effective they are. Even though we still allegedly have a lot of activity, would we have more without our efforts?

Although it is inarguably part of the university's role to urge their students to comply with the law, behave in ethical manners, and teach that by example, we are only their teachers.

We are not their parents and we are not the police. We had no role in instilling or molding their characters or their ethical or religious belief system. In fact, we didn't even teach them the computer skills necessary to accomplish P2P sharing. They came to us with these behaviors and skills fully set and continually reinforced by their peers.

So when did we become responsible (in a legal and money sense) for the students P2P file sharing? If a student uses dormitory phones to conduct drug deals or extortion, is the university responsible? Should phone access be terminated? What if our students steal cable TV service" Should Congress pass a bill that withholds federal funding from our schools until the cable TV companies are financially satisfied? Since when did higher education become responsible for the profit margin of the entertainment industry?

So, where did November go? And Christmas is just around the corner? It is time to say goodbye to our November guest blogger, Peggy Hoon. Peggy, thank you so much for joining us. I hope you enjoyed blogging as much as we enjoyed reading your posts. Feel free to come on over and post again, any time you would like. You are always welcomed.

I didn't invite a guest for December. It's just such a hectic month for most of us. If your schedule is like mine, it will be hard to focus on things like copyright (nah...) Well, I'll do my best to keep us in the loop until January arrives and we settle back down to business.

I wonder if any of our readers has a recommendation for a guest blogger for winter/spring? What kind of folks would you like to hear more from? More lawyers? More librarians? More lawyer librarians? More grad students? Professors? Let me hear from you if you've got ideas about our future guest bloggers. Thanks!

We are very lucky to have as our guest blogger this month, a colleague and friend of mine from way back, Kenny Crews. Kenny has newly joined Columbia University's Library as Director of its Copyright Advisory Office. Long before that, however, he was one of the first lawyer-librarians to establish an active Web presence with the introduction of the Copyright Management Center at IUPUI. That virtual Center was a real inspiration to me.

Today Kenny is in Germany and perhaps he can tell us something about what he is up to there. Thankfully that won't keep him from blogging with us through May. Welcome, Kenny!

I am back in the USA this weekend, after an exciting week in Bayreuth, Germany. In addition to the adventures of European travel, and enjoying a few too many sausages and beers, I had a great copyright expedition. Some of you might know that I have strong ties to Munich, the Max Planck Institute, and the LL.M. degree program offered by the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (www.miplc.de). One of my Munich colleagues, Prof. Ansgar Ohly, is now on the faculty at the University of Bayreuth. Coincidentally, he also supervised the doctoral studies of one of my former students from Indiana University, Achim Foerster. So with those multiple contacts at one university came the opportunity to be a guest for the week.

I had the privilege of teaching a short course and giving a public presentation. My course was a quick overview of US copyright law, but in the context of international developments (such as the Berne Convention). My presentation had this busy title: "Exceptions, Limitations, Open Access: The Creation of a Copyright Public Domain." My main point: At a time of expanding copyright protection--as a result of automatic protection of nearly all works for a extensive period of years--the law is responding with gestures that attempt to create a "public domain" or at least a multi-facted zone of public protection. I focused on three developments from just the last few months:

(1) The Section 108 Study Group Report. Through the possible creation and reform of exceptions, Congress has the possibililty of securing space for public uses of copyrighted works. I was not too kind about the report, but my point was more general about the importance of exceptions.

(2) Orphan Works bills just introduced into Congress. Through the crafting of limitations on remedies that may be recovered in some litigation, Congress can again give some protection for certain favored uses. I had nothing good to say about these particular bills. But they are another example of Congress giving relief from certain penalties for infringement.

(3) The NIH Public Access Policy. While the open access movement is a phenomenon that is less law and mostly copyright management, this particular policy is law. Peer-reviewed publications funded by NIH are now required to be submitted to PubMed Central for public access. This is a very good development. But again my point: Congress is creating a "public domain" be carving out space for public uses.

The contours of the "public domain" are complex. Congress continues to experiment. Some proposals are seriously problematic (e.g., the orphan works bill), but these three developments in just the last few months demonstrate that the regime of copyright has become too aggressive in its scope and reach. In reaction, Congress is struggling with innovative was to give some benefit back to the public. Sadly, these are only tiny adjustments, and worse, only one (the NIH policy) probably has any chance of really producing the intended benefits.

My audience in Germany found these issues intriguing. They were familiar with many of the issues in general, and even the details of some. They especially wanted to know why the US copyright exceptions are so lengthy and complex. One colleague mentioned that the text of just the US exceptions is approximately the length of the entire German copyright law. On the other hand, they found it curious that we would then have the brief and flexible law of fair use. Why not something in the middle?

Great question. I think the answer is a blur of history. Fair use does more than allow uses of copyrighted works. It is the place for experimenting with technology, exercising free speech, and adapting to new creativity. Any attempt to be more specific would squelch those important pursuits. In the original 1976 Act, most of the other exceptions were comparatively brief. The leadership in Congress understood the importance of making the exceptions workable. True, some were complicated, but they were usually for the benefit of industries that would likely have laywers up to the challenge. In more recent years, however, the drafting of exceptions has been heavily influced by multiple interested parties with divergent views. The result is a statute that attempts to assuage diverse concerns and satisfy am amalgamation of lobbying pressures. "Workable" may not be the purpose of some statutes.

Did I say "assuage"? That sounds too much like "sausage." I was indeed deep in Germany, near the Czech border, within sight of Richard Wagner's estate, and perhaps giving him a little tweak about copyrights. Most of all, I had a splendid time with great colleagues and students. I also came home with a few more new insights about German copyright.

Thanks for your interest!