Legal Considerations
The discussion on this page is background for deciding what kinds of
printing of the PDF file of each book are permissible under the law and
what kinds are not. I am not a lawyer and cannot provide explicit
advice on the matter. This page instead describes some of the
legal considerations that are involved.
The website of the U.S. Copyright Office is www.copyright.gov, an
overview of copyright may be found at
www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf,
and the
explicit discussion of the provisions of the copyright law is
copyright.gov/fair-use.
Roughly speaking, the owner or licensee of the copyright to a book or
other creation has the exclusive right to do certain things with that
creation. Section 106 of title 17 of the United States Code, as
amended, tells what those things are. For example, one of those
things is the exclusive right to reproduce the copyrighted item.
Section 107 and some
later sections list some exceptions, thus giving circumstances under
which the copyright holder is not the only person with the right to do
those things. Section 107 discusses “fair use,” which is what is
relevant here. Fair use is discussed at the website
copyright.gov/fair-use.
Unfortunately there is no concrete definition of fair use.
Instead, fair use is a notion that grew out of common law and was
enshrined in the U.S. copyright law only recently. Thus past
court decisions, especially at the level of the U.S. Supreme Court and
the circuit courts of appeals, provide a number of examples of fair use
and unfair use. In a given situation a federal court has to
decide whether or not a particular proposed exception is one of fair
use. In former times the court had to rely exclusively on
precedents, but nowadays it also has the benefit of the general
discussion of fair use in Section 107.
These matters are spelled out in a document called Circular 21, which
is available at www.copyright.gov/circs/circ21.pdf.
Circular 21
concerns parts of title 17 of the United States Code, as amended.
Section 106 of title 17 says, “Subject to sections 107 through 122, the
owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and
to authorize any of the following.” Then follows a list of
four
things. Section 107 provides that one limitation on exclusive
rights is “fair use.” “The fair use of a copyrighted work,
including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any
other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for
classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of
copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any
particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall
include:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use
is of
a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
- the nature of the copyrighted work;
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to
the copyrighted work as a whole; and
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of
the copyrighted work.”
For the notion of fair use in an educational setting, Circular 21
provides more specific guidelines. Apparently these guidelines
represent a truce establishing for educational institutions an area of
permitted activity and an area of forbidden activity. I shall not
attempt to summarize these guidelines, but they are worth checking.
The website of the copyright office includes also a list of summaries
of
relevant court decisions. This list is accessed from
copyright.gov/fair-use/fair-index.html.
It is helpful to narrow
the search, and one way to do that is to select only
“Education/Scholarship/Research” as the category of decisions to
search
through. One then gets summaries of approximately 50 decisions,
most of them resulting in a finding of “fair use found” or else
“fair
use not found.” Reading some of the details of these gives
one
the flavor of borderline questions of fair use and the kind of
reasoning
that courts employ to decide such borderline questions.
Last modified: 4/12/2022