2017 Charleston Library Conference

The wide range of responses to Sci-Hub and other organized piracy operations has exposed, more than ever before, how much disagreement there is in the scholarly-communication world about the proper place of copyright protections. Does copyright law, as currently constituted in the US and the UK, provide a net benefit or cause a net detriment to scholarship and to the world at large? Has it outlived its usefulness?

If we grant that copyright is, on balance, a good thing, then we still need to talk about how broad the provisions of fair use/fair dealing should be, and how stringently copyright law should be enforced. And should we be thinking about copyright very differently in the academic sphere than we do in the arts? This panel session will present differing perspectives on these issues from several experts from around the scholarly-communication ecosystem, followed by discussion with the audience.