WebJunction

I've seen the question in these forums about copyright notice signs near scanners, but I want to find out what libraries are doing about the Section 108 requirement to have a copyright notice on the copy request form, when there is no request form. In these days of phone, e-mail and IM reference, the patron isn't around to see a copy order form or a sign.

If we FAX a photocopy to a patron the FAX cover sheet has the required notice on it. When we scan in a source to e-mail it to the patron instead, we don't use the FAX cover sheet.

If you scan and e-mail articles to remote patrons, do you include the verbose notice as an extra page 1 of the attached file, or do you include it in the body of the e-mail message, or do you not do anything to include it since no "form" is involved?

But if you photocopy and then stamp it, that's an extra step and wasted paper if you could have just scanned from the source. Scanning from the source means that you have nothing to stamp.

Assuming that the copyright warning (the really long one, by law) has to go in there somewhere:

I'm picturing maybe a cover sheet that gets scanned in as a page 1 each time so that it is included in the file that you e-mail to the patron, but this makes the file size larger and takes the time of scanning one more page. The advantage to this is that you know as the digital copy travels, the warning travels with it.

The alternative of including the warning inside the scan itself is adding it to the e-mail, which would be easy enough as a draft message that you edit each time you send anything to a patron.

The Library of Congress has a group working on Section 108 issues, and one of the Federal Register announcements (http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2006/71fr70434.html) says, "However, digital copying under subsections (d) and (e) is effectively barred by subsection 108(a)’s single–copy limit." This is because it's impossible to scan and transmit without the creation of more than one copy. (You can't photocopy and then FAX without the creation of more than one copy either, right?) So, technically, we're already breaking the law if we do this, "although section 107 (which sets forth the fair use exceptions) might apply in some cases, and licenses might be implied in others."

We aren't scanning for patrons yet, but we just recently got our first scanner/printer and were wondering what other libraries are doing. The Section 108 study group is, I think, already late and there's no telling when their recommendations will come out, much less be getting into the CFR or whatever.