This is a story that won't end here, but raises a lot of important issues for academia. As do many universities, Georgia State produces on-line study materials from published material, for use as course readings link here. It is now being sued by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publications for copyright infringement. The complaint, violating publishers rights, is based on the extent of the copying because it goes way beyond fair use. I would expect Georgia State to lose the case under current copyright law since it had not obtained permission or paid for a license.

In the absence of changing the law, the only way around this is to get authors to make the texts available on line, perhaps for limited uses, as our own David Levine has done and allow commercial publication with this understanding. As we have written before, academic authors need to be urged to adopt such an arrangement, perhaps using a little friendly collegial pressure. That will still leave a lot of published material that would be useful for courses but could not be used without permission. Would a change in copyright be feasible that made such use an exception? That seems unlikely, but worth thinking about.