Such a stratification would severely damage the fabric of know ledge creation and diffusion in our society. In the time available to me this morning, I want to review the developments in litigation, legislation, and campus based discussions. I expect this review will then identify the concerns research and academic libraries have as we move into the new electronic environment. Judicial Developments Fair use is a critically important doctrine in U S copyright law. It allows users of copyrighted materials teachers, students, scholars, artists to use these materials without seeking permission from the creator or publisher and without paying copyright fees.
Fair use allows users to draw on the work of others.
It allows scholars to advance a new argument, reviewers to criticize, artists to parody, and teachers to acquaint students with fresh insights. Of course, there are limitations on fair use. The most basic is that the use cannot significantly undercut what the creator or publisher might gain from commercial sale of the work. In the U S courts, there is an intensified testing of current practices in regard to copyright. This is the result of an apparent strategy by major commercial publishers to pursue litigation under the current Copyright Law to define more expansively the rights of intellectual property owners.