Dive Brief:
- A potential U.S. Supreme Court showdown is percolating over the fair use of copyrighted material that is stored digitally by colleges and universities.
- The potential showdown was set up by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the circuit that covers Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, which said it won’t rehear a case about whether Georgia State University violated copyrights with its e-reserves, Inside Higher Ed reports.
- Because the publishers suing the school were rejected in their quest for a rehearing, they may take their case up the ladder to the Supreme Court.
Dive Insight:
In October, the Court of Appeals ruled that it is legal for higher education institutions to create digital reserves of the books they own. But the court also rejected any broad, one-size-fits-all rules for determining what constitutes fair use. That decision was considered a partial victory for the publishers suing Georgia State — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications —but they still asked for the full case to be reheard. They contended that the university’s practice of allowing faculty to scan book excerpts into the university’s e-reserves for students to read online was a copyright violation.