On Monday 9th September over 40 university copyright specialists met for our annual summer get together organised by the UUK Copyright Negotiation and Advisory Committee (CNAC). The event was jointly chaired by Chris Morrison from the University of Kent and Jane Secker, City, University of London. The morning was a closed session for universities who first discussed recent research into the value of the CLA Licence. You can see our slides here. This was followed by a session led by Chris Jones from the University of Reading into the copying of newspaper content as part of an ongoing research project conducted by the CNAC . Finally Claire Kidwell from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance provided an update on progress towards a Printed Music Licence for higher education.
This year’s keynote speaker was Professor Sol Picciotto, Emeritus Professor of Law from Lancaster University who was a member of the precursor group to CNAC for many years. Most significantly he was part of the group in 2000 when a dispute over the nature of the higher education licence resulted in UUK taking the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) to the Copyright Tribunal. In his presentation, From Cyclostyling to Digital Repositories, Sol gave a personal account of his involvement in copying for educational purposes since his first teaching appointment in the late 1960s in Africa. He outlined some of the issues over the years of providing students with access to copies of published content, and reflected on how far we have come and lessons that can be learnt. He also raised broader issues over whether academic content is private property or public goods and whether the current system is serving the academic community well. [Ed – you can read Sol’s full scholarly treatment of this topic in his article Copyright licensing : the case of higher education photocopying in the UK in the European Intellectual Property Review, Vol. 24, No. 9, 2002, p. 438-447. We also have an upcoming copyright waffle podcast on the topic]
The afternoon also saw presentations from a number of guests from various copyright organisations including:
- James Bennett from CLA – CLA Licence and value response [PDF]
- Helena Djukovic from the Educational Recording Agency (ERA) – ERA Update [PDF]
- Viki Smith from the Printing Music Licensing Limited (PMLL) / Music Publishers Association – HE Music Licence Update [PDF]
- Nic Fearon-Low from the Intellectual Property Office – IPO Update [PDF]
- Henry Petit from the Newspaper Licensing Agency – NLA Media Update [PDF]
Our guests joined Sol on a panel discussion with questions from the floor to end the afternoon. Thanks to the CILIP Information Literacy Group for sponsoring the event and to the CNAC for putting together the programme.
Copyright Literacy 
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