Why you should listen to librarians about copyright

A librarian colleague recently sent out an announcement about the UM Libraries’ copyright workshops to faculty in one of the departments she works with. One of the faculty members responded to my colleague by suggesting that such educational
opportunities would be more valuable for her, as a member of the faculty, if they were conducted by someone who “really knows about copyright, like an attorney.” This is not the first time I’ve had someone (almost always a faculty member) suggest librarians aren’t a “real” source of information about copyright.

This makes me angry – but not on my own behalf. I have a J.D. and an attorney license I can wave at people who are this hung up on credentials.

This makes me angry on behalf of my colleagues (MLS-accredited librarians and beyond), many of whom are far more qualified to discuss copyright with a faculty member than many attorneys. Here are some reasons why:

1. A lot of lawyers don’t know much about copyright

I got an email the other day from a classmate who took a course in copyright law with me asking if he could just copy images from other websites onto his blog, because you can just use things that are online, right? Dude (who shall remain nameless) is a practicing attorney. And very very wrong about a basic issue in copyright.

The standard law school curriculum never goes anywhere near copyright. Even “IP overview” classes usually spend a lot more time on patent and trademark than on copyright, although that’s changing at many schools. Almost all attorneys have a baseline knowledge in contract, property, criminal law, and other standard subjects. But they do not have such knowledge of copyright. And copyright is a pretty complicated area of law. It’s in the professional ethics code (see CA ethics code) that attorneys can get themselves up to speed on unfamiliar areas of law in order to represent clients, but I would not want to be represented by a generalist on anything more than a very basic copyright issue.

There are some attorneys that specialize in copyright, or practice a lot in the area. They will have much better knowledge and advice than generalists.

2. Librarians get context

Librarians understand the structures of knowledge and information. Few copyright specialist attorneys have extensive experience with academic publishing, but academic librarians – they have an amazing view of the whole system and life-cycle of scholarly publishing. While I can’t speak as broadly about my public librarian and special librarian colleagues, I know they, too, have amazing understandings of how information, knowledge, and culture interrelate.

3. Librarians just know a lot about copyright

This fall, I did some research into what UM faculty (and lecturers and researchers) and library employees understand about copyright. The results are not scientifically rigorous (convenience-sampling, N=~50), but they do show some interesting trends.

Faculty and librarians both have a lot to learn about copyright. Across the more complex questions (usually something like “You want to make use X. Which of the following are relevant © considerations?”), both librarians and faculty got things right and wrong at similar rates. But as the table below shows, on all these complex questions, librarians were usually juuust a little more right than faculty.

More importantly, on non-complex questions, such as how a copyright comes into existence, how long it lasts, and what happens when you transfer your copyrights to a publisher, library employees blew faculty out of the water

There’s an old(er) piece of web content (dating back to 1997) entitled “Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian” Worship is a little stronger than what I’m advocating for here, and I’m not suggesting that librarians are the only or best source of information about copyright. But I am strongly suggesting that if a librarian has information to share with you about copyright, you might want to listen pretty closely.

ETA, 2/8/11: I’m not suggesting that librarians can provide formal legal advice about copyright issues, nor that all library workers do (or should) understand copyright inside and out. I am simply suggesting that someone who works in a library who tells you that they have copyright information to share is probably significantly better-informed than most non-lawyers, and probably has solid, relevant information. I am also suggesting that it is almost always a good idea to talk with a specialist attorney for actual legal advice about copyright, since it is a specialized area of law.

This post is my just-under-the-wire contribution to Library Day in the Life Project, Round 6 It’s not quite in the standard order of the project, which is to show what a librarian’s workday is actually like, but I’d like to think it fits the spirit of the project, which is to break up stereotypes about what librarians do and know.