You need to understand your teacher’s interests; a librarian’s job is necessarily one that requires a narrow view of copyright.

Lawyers know someone can be very clear and compelling — and even dead-on accurate about his client’s legitimate view of the world — without telling the whole truth.

A librarian sent the video available from the Copyright Clearance Center at this link to my colleague Carolyn Jack, explaining that it explains copyright in a “clear and engaging way.”  There’s no doubt she’s right about that.  It’s very well done.  But it is very much a librarian’s take on copyright.  Librarians control access to scholarship in print and behind subscription-only paywalls. They certainly can’t bypass those paywalls simply by re-posting material, which seems to be a practice the offending librarian is surprised to learn is a problem.  Moreover, a librarian’s job is to maintain and ease access to the material in the library.  There may be ways portions of the material are republished to create more useful means of finding and accessing them, but it would be difficult to imagine those methods would risk infringement.  Plainly, though, the sheer volume and value of the material in a librarian’s control and the need to educate a library’s users on not abusing it is going to make librarians very risk averse.

Therefore, this video leans heavily on the side of copyright holders. That’s not to say it’s inaccurate (and it’s very well done), but one has to walk away from it thinking using copyrighted works is rarely okay. It certainly doesn’t even allude to “transformative uses,” and, while accurate, it’s gloss on fair use is so cursory (and the subject
so complex) that one can’t walk away from it with an idea of what would be fair use. It definitely is a librarian’s piece — their interests are in making sure nothing is done wrong. I don’t blame them; I’m just not sure that the video in the end does much more than say, “Be careful, and when in any doubt don’t do it.” I’m not sure that’s useful to, say, artists or those who would comment on the laws of copyright, among others.

Thus, I don’t think this video does what the Copyright Clearance Center, according to the librarian who sent the video to Geniocity, claims it is doing: “CCC is making the video available for free for anyone who wants to use it for educational purposes. Since corporate librarians are so often called on to educate folks on copyright matters, we thought you’d be interested . . . .”

ADDENDUM: Context is everything, and I want to note the very valid comments a couple of librarians have added to this post.  Larisa points out that librarians are dedicated to providing, not restricting access to information, and suggests that my critique might be better aimed at “corporate” rather than public librarians.  Rob emphasizes both the quality of the video (it teaches someone with no knowledge of copyright an awful lot in 6 minutes) while acknowledging the issues such a brief introduction inevitably leaves hanging.  He’s worth quoting in his entirety:

Your comments are eminently reasonable in respect of this well-done video and its brevity. While incompletely exploring the issue of Fair Use, in the range of most modern-day attenition spans, it does provide a basic grounding in copyright for the unititated in organizations and institutions(i.e. most corporate executives and their respective staffs, a majority of faculty).

In addition, it engagingly presents an opportunity to raise questions such as those here: archivist? preservationist? public/academic/corporate librarian? Fair use? – and presents ample opportunity for informed and intelligent discussion among those suitably interested.

Finally, one cannot come away from the 6+ minutes of this charming video without being forever better informed than 6 minutes previously. How many things have we seen or heard lately about which we can say that? Too few, I’d wager.