Courseware, E-reserves and Copyright, Oh My!
An interview with Rosemary Chase, Copyright Officer of GMU
When Rosemary Chase was first hired by George Mason University (GMU) more than 15 years ago, her main copyright focus was coursepacks. How times have changed. Recently, Copyright Clearance Center chatted with the GMU copyright officer to get her insight into current content usage trends and what her campus is doing to promote respect for intellectual property rights.
Excerpts:
Q: Tell us about your role at George Mason University and how it has evolved.
A: I started here in 1990 in print services. By 2000, I was hired by the libraries because they needed someone to help with all kinds of copyright permissions, not just for printing. Courseware was coming into being. People wanted to digitize things and broadcast them on TV for distance education. Now I work with a lot of people all over campus on copyright issues.
Q: Talk about some of the copyright and content usage trends and challenges you see.
A: We have a lot of electronic databases, for which we pay a lot of money. I have an objection to the fact that many of them do not address electronic reserves in their licenses. Or they specifically do not allow electronic reserve linking. I don’t know if it’s the databases or the newspapers they represent that won’t allow us to link to articles.
Another issue I’m dealing with is that we’re getting a lot more permission requests for digitized book chapters. This has caused us to examine who is taking advantage of our generosity with electronic reserves, since the library gets the permissions and pays the royalty fees. We’re paying the royalty fees, so we’re not doing anything wrong. It just seems like sometimes students should just buy the book.
Q: What other trends have you seen?
A: I’ve consulted with our coursepack producers on campus and they have seen a reduction in the use of coursepacks. For a while, it was going up and down. Some of the professors would do coursepacks and then the students would say they want the material in electronic reserves. So the professors would offer it in electronic reserves, and then they would go back to coursepacks. Now faculty can’t make up their minds which way they want to go, because they can’t please all of their students. So now we’re paying for permissions for both uses, because faculty want to make the material available to their students electronically and in coursepacks.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you face today that you didn’t have to deal with five years ago?
A: There is more courseware use, like WebCT and Blackboard. Also, people want to use more music and images and other multimedia. So that makes my life interesting.
Q: So you deal with copyright issues around the use of text material as well as other types of protected content?
A: Yes. And multimedia issues are only going to get more complicated. For example, now our music librarian is talking about streaming music into the electronic reserves system. Other universities are already doing it. Plus we’re dealing with movie rights as well, for the use of movie clips in classes.
Q: Given all the news coverage on copyright issues over the last several years, are new students more copyright-savvy than they used to be?
A: I’d like to say that it’s improved, but it really hasn’t.
Q: Can you talk about the safeguards GMU has put into place to prevent unauthorized use and distribution of intellectual property?
A: We have a copyright policy and procedures, which are readily available to anyone online. Using courseware has one set of procedures. Using electronic reserves has another. Using coursepacks has yet another. And using media has still another set. I refer to all of these guidelines and tell faculty about what their options are to legally provide materials to their students. In my workshops I remind people that the university will stand up for anyone who follows the policy. If they don’t follow the policy, they’re on their own.
To raise student awareness of copyright law and electronic reserves content, we’ve posted signs on all of the PC’s and printers in the library and labs on campus. So in addition to just posting notices on the university copy machines, we also post it on all of the PC’s.
Q: What keeps you up at night?
A: For a while, there were administrators on campus who wanted to know exactly how many people were using WebCT. We have a number, but we don’t know who is using the courseware or who is digitizing articles on it. I tried every angle I could to get that information, but finding out would be an invasion of their privacy. I am planning on doing a survey, but we have to verify that the survey would be anonymous. We really want to know how many renegades we have on campus, and where we are in terms of how far we have to go to raise awareness.
Q: How do you educate faculty and staff about the right ways to use and share protected content?
A: I’ve increased the amount and types of workshops that I give. It’s not just about copyright and coursepacks anymore. One workshop is all about media. I offer another on fair use in the digital age. I also give workshops on ways to prevent plagiarism and file-sharing. My job is to inform the university. Even though this campus has been aware, there are always new people and new students. So it’s a never-ending job.
