[Air-L] Paper: Contractual Override: How Private Contracts Undermine the Goals of the Copyright Act for Libraries and Researchers, and What We Can Do About It

[Joly MacFie]

Contractual Override: How Private Contracts Undermine the Goals of the
Copyright Act for Libraries and Researchers, and What We Can Do About It
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5393510

*A wide variety of scholarly and academic uses of copyrighted materials are
governed not by copyright law itself but by licenses, terms of service, and
other privately crafted contractual terms. In many cases, those terms
purport to override exceptions and limitations granted by Congress in the
Copyright Act for the benefit of users. As compared to other jurisdictions,
the US does not have clear statutory provisions preventing private
contracts from overriding certain user rights-rights that are meant to
support innovation, teaching, research, and preservation, and designed to
strike a careful balance between the interests of the public and copyright
owners. Allowing contracts to upset this balance risks granting copyright
owners excessive control at the public's expense, ultimately stifling
innovation, creativity and the free expression rights of subsequent
authors. This paper is about the harm caused by contractual override to two
of the most vulnerable and impacted user groups-academic researchers and
libraries, and ways to limit that harm.*

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Joly MacFie  +12185659365
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