The Digital Reader

About the presenter

This session is hosted by Christopher Keneally, the Director of Business Development at the Copyright Clearance Center. The CCC is a world expert in copyright licensing solutions.

My audio of the session (WMA) (posted with permission of the presenter)

The session opened with a video which you can find here. The CCC is hosting it directly; it’s not on Youtube. The video was a good basic explanation of copyright, but it misses a couple of nuances. For example, work created by the US gov’t has no copyright, but if that same work is created by a contractor then it does have a copyright. There were other small exceptions like that, but they weren’t a big deal.

Mr. Keneally then covered some common misconceptions.

Misconceptions & Truth

• having a copyright policy is sufficient
• education of users and effective licensing can reduce risk

Misconceptions & Truth

• librarian or info professional can handle all copyright questions
• most users don’t know that they need to ask, or even who to ask

Misconceptions & Truth

• everything we do is online, so we have reduced copyright risk
• technology doesn’t reduce risk

Misconceptions & Truth

• publicly available material doesn’t require permission
• publicly available material may still be protected by copyright

Misconceptions & Truth

• my company will never get into trouble with copyright
• companies of all sizes get into trouble every week

He tried to show a second video, but the network wouldn’t cooperate:

The rest of the presentation was a pretty good basic introduction to copyright as well a brief summary of the History of the Google books settlement. TBH, this presentation could have just as well been presented in a webcast. Listen to the audio I posted, watch the 2 videos, and you’ll get about 95% of the value in the presentation.