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EMPLOYEE MISTAKES CAN LEAD TO INFRINGEMENT. INFRINGEMENT CAN LEAD TO LAWSUITS. LAWSUITS CAN COST MILLIONS. A LITTLE EDUCATION CAN SAVE A LOT OF TROUBLE.
"Wait, you mean I can't just take an article off the Internet and email it? But I thought anything on the Internet is public?"
"If someone emails me an article then it's OK for me to send it to someone else, right?"
"I thought if we have a licensing agreement with a publisher we can use it any way we want. So you're saying I can email an article to people who work here but not to customers? And I can use it in a presentation but I can't put it on our intranet?"
"I thought our annual copyright license means we can use any content from any journal we subscribe to. Now you're saying we also have licensing agreements directly with some publishers that give us other rights too?"
"If I source the information then I'm OK with copyright, right?"
"I don't know if we have a license to use this content but I've got to get these articles out to my customers right now. Anyway, there's not much at stake even if I did get caught. "
Sound familiar? No doubt you and every other corporate librarian have heard a lot of these questions many times. So have the people who manage copyright training and education programs. In large part, employees' lack of copyright knowledge reflects changes brought on by the Internet. Copyrighted works are readily available in multiple hard copy and electronic formats and can be easily copied and distributed from the desktop in multiple ways. It's difficult for knowledge workers to know when they're standing on solid copyright ground.
"In many cases, copyright infringement isn't deliberate or malicious, it's just that so many people go through life without being exposed to copyright education," says Maury M. Tepper, III, an intellectual property lawyer with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, in Raleigh, North Carolina, who has represented hundreds of clients and also worked on the corporate side in the pharmaceutical industry.
"Of course, lots of infringement goes on because people don't bother or care about permissions; or they copy and email the content anyway because they need to...