In 2020, ARL’s Advocacy and Public Policy Committee launched a digital rights initiative focused on understanding and safeguarding the full stack of research libraries’ rights: to acquire and lend digital content to fulfill libraries’ functions in research, teaching, and learning; to provide accessible works to people with print disabilities; and to fulfill libraries’ collective preservation function for enduring access to scholarly and cultural works. Our objective is to make sure that these rights are well understood by research libraries, by Congress, by the US Copyright Office, and by the courts. This report discusses licenses and contracts for digital content in the context of the US Copyright Act. The report presents advocacy and public policy strategies, such as rights-saving clauses, open access, state strategies, and federal exemptions. The report concludes with next steps, including a test case and ARL strategies. This paper was informed by conversations with ARL’s Advocacy and Public Policy Committee, and members of the University Information Policy Officers (UIPO), including Brandon Butler, Kyle Courtney, Sandra Enimil, Rachael Samberg, Nancy Sims, and Claire Stewart.
Copyright and Contracts: Issues and Strategies
To cite
Klosek, Katherine. Copyright and Contracts: Issues and Strategies. Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, July 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.29242/report.copyrightandcontracts2022.
