This is certainly something that faculty suggest from time
to
time, but I personally have always resisted the idea. It is
not
that I think there are legal or contractual problems with
it,
just practical ones.
As far as copyright law goes, the doctrine of first sale (17
U.S.C. 109) certainly applies to allow faculty members to
donate
the particular copies of a journal they have purchased to
any
organization they wish. There might, of course, be
contractual
obligations on the purchaser of a subscription, but my
experience
as a subscriber is that I have never had to agree to any
kind of
contract that governed the transaction; it has always been a
simple sale of goods. I would be very reluctant to
surrender
first sale or its equivalent in any kind of individual
purchase.
The practical problem with this suggestion is on the library
end,
where serials management would become just about impossible.
There would be no regular schedule for receipt and no
mechanism
for claiming missing issues, to name just two immediate
problems.
No librarian wants to explain to patrons that we don't know
when
the next issue of journal X will arrive because we are
dependant
on the memory, and the reading habits, of professor Y. And
what
happens when Professor Y changes jobs?
By the way, I was at a copyright conference quite a few
years ago
where all the law school professors in the room, when they
heard
how much libraries pay for journal subscriptions, loudly
began to
suggest this "work around." Clearly they did not
see any legal
impediment to the plan.
It was the librarians (as it often is) who explained why it
was a
practical necessity for us to "play by the rules,"
even when
those rules seem to make scholarship increasingly
difficult.
Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Scholarly Communications Officer
Perkins Library, Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
kevin.l.smith duke.edu
http://libra
ry.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/
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