[bksvol-discuss] International issues and building the global library

  • From: <Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 17:25:06 -0800

Sarah, just wanted to clarify that I only said that I don't want Bookshare.org 
scans going to illegal purposes.  I do understand that there could be legal 
purposes: for example, someone who scans a book for a school for a student with 
a disability under fair use or under state law (which may include a book 
purchase requirement) can submit the same scan to Bookshare.org.  If NLS or 
RFB&D wanted your scans as well, that would be fine with me.  If you have a 
bona fide legal place to send it, that's ok.  But, other than schools (for the 
purposes of providing an accessible book for a student with a disability), or 
national Chafee authorized organizations, there probably are not other legal 
options where distributing a scanned book to a third party is explicitly ok 
under U.S. copyright law.  And, some schools have gotten legal opinions 
discouraging them even from meeting their legal obligations to provide 
accessible books to students!

And, I'm not making this up on the fly here.  Section 7.4 of the Volunteer 
Agreement covers this issue in some detail:

"7.4    Material scanned by Volunteer may not be used for purposes other than 
those outlined in the Volunteer job description or distributed to third 
parties, because such uses would generally violate Copyright law.  There are 
some narrow exclusions that may apply to Volunteers who are actively working 
for the educational system and/or have specific legal authority to scan books 
(for example, a teacher or aide scanning a book for a disabled student under a 
specific state law mandating or permitting such access).  Volunteer is 
responsible for ensuring that any such activities are conducted in compliance 
with applicable laws and is advised to consult with legal counsel on whether 
such exclusions apply to Volunteer's activities.

While Volunteer may have to copy or modify the Content as part of Volunteer 
Activities, Volunteer agrees not to reproduce or redistribute those materials 
to or for anyone else without the prior written permission of Benetech.  
Volunteer understands that any violation of these restrictions, including, but 
not limited to, assisting anyone else to defeat the encryption involved in 
delivery of these Content, may constitute copyright infringement for which 
Volunteer will be liable to the copyright owners and may violate the provisions 
of 17 U.S.C. §1201 and other parts of the Copyright laws."

I also covered this explicitly (but more simply) in an earlier email, where I 
tackled three cases.  The third was:

"Sending books you scan for Bookshare.org to someplace illegal. Also uncool, 
and against the volunteer agreement. We don't want a publisher to discover a 
Bookshare.org book on some warez site, compare it to our copy (which we will 
let them do) and find it is the same scanned book. "

Happy to keep clarifying.

Jim
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