Copyright Issues: Licensing Societies

1.    While we are told that the HK Reprographic Rights Licensing Society represents the publishers of some 1.7 million publications, we have not had any experience that tells us in reality if and how this would work.  I questioned whether publishers would get much after our local society, plus and the international society with which they are affiliated, took their share of whatever we paid them. 

2.    Academic information is international rather than local.  A local society cannot hope to meaningfully represent thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries.  They say they are a part of an international group but what does that mean when it comes to paying a fee for making 5 copies of an article in a journal published in Switzerland?  To give them money to do something that cannot be done is not a good use of the taxpayer’s money.

3.    Paying local licensing societies money ignores the real situation besetting today’s academic libraries.  Virtually all of our electronic periodicals and book agreements require the signing of licenses directly with publishers, mostly overseas but some in China.  These licenses require us to pay for all the information we consume.  To pay a separate licensing society would be like double taxation.

4.   The requirement that publicly supported education sector libraries must pay licensing societies for the kinds of copying that we do ignores the principle of fair dealing which a reasonable portion of a work can be copied for an educational purpose.  Section 45 of the Copyright Ordinance specifies that “copies of artistic works or of passages from published literary, dramatic or musical works may, to a reasonable extent, be made by or on behalf of an educational establishment for the purposes of instruction without infringing any copyright in the work, or in the typographical arrangement.”  Requiring non profit institutions of learning to pay licensing fees assumes that all copying is beyond a reasonable extent.  

Paying a society for blanket coverage may insure that all copying is legal, but it ignores the existing tool of fair use or dealing which balances the rights of publishers with the rights of society to educate its members.  Some might say that they agree that paying a blanket amount is unfair and so libraries should only pay on a transaction by transaction basis. While this may sound reasonable, it means that libraries must keep laborious records and file reports for copying that should be covered under fair dealing anyway.

I then went on to give them a concrete example within the context of a university library for which some libraries put copies of articles on reserve for students to read.  I noted that in North America libraries often put up one copy for every 15 students while some libraries in Hong Kong put nothing on reserve for fear of breaking the law.  I noted that it was sad that the needs of students seemed to have been set aside because of the harshness of the laws here.