This coming Monday I will once again team up with Dr. Kenneth Crews, the Director of Columbia University Libraries & Information Services' Copyright Advisory Office, to offer a workshop for graduate students on how to handle intellectual property issues as they research and write their theses and dissertations.
Copyright is certainly in the news a lot these days, with cases involving digital library collections making the front pages, whether its the Georgia State e-reserves or HathiTrust's book digitization project, but despite all the coverage intellectual property still seems to be alien terrain for a lot of faculty and students.
And yet, intellectual property is a core academic issue, something that we engage with every day, even if we don't realize we are doing it: did you know that virtually everything you write, whether on paper or on a computer, is subject to copyright protection? And that means you own the right to distribute, reproduce, and re-use it, and to grant those rights to others as you see fit?
Of course, others have the same rights as well, which means that you need to be conscious of how copyright functions when you are reproducing other people's creations in your own scholarship. Fair use is an important factor here, something that formed the basis of the decision in the Georgia State and HathiTrust cases, but its not something that can be summed up in a sentence or two: that's why you should join Kenny and me next Monday at 1pm in Butler Library, room 523!
(But if you can't join us, don't despair! We'll be offering this workshop again in the spring semester, and the video from last year's workshop is on the Columbia YouTube channel!)
Robert Hilliker manages Academic Commons, Columbia's digital repository.
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