Sunday morning I had a bit of a heated Twitter discussion with @suzanne_una and @MomsL8 (Jill) regarding the high cost of a series of DVDs. The phrase "fair use" was tossed around quite a bit. The Fair Use Doctrine allows for snippets of primary content to be used in specific secondary contexts without having to license the use of that information. It does not cover the wholesale xeroxing of school textbooks or the "public performance" (e.g., playing to a group of people in an auditorium or cinema, or over a nightclub's sound system) of a TV show, movie, or song. The original content creators (or owners) have a reasonable expectation of some sort of control over the publication or performance of that content -- which often includes some sort of payment (usually money, attribution, or both).
Some time after the conversation petered out, I started thinking about how current copyright laws could affect diabetes education.
First, a quick digression. This blog post you're reading? There are several different copyrights that come into play here. Separate copyrights cover my words, every other collection of words on the page, every separate graphical element, the design of the page, and so on. For any publication, there is a reasonable likelihood that what looks like "a snippet" could be the entirety of a particular content creator's contribution -- and not a "snippet" at all. Add to this that in certain industries, "fair use" does not exist, and you must obtain permission to quote even ten words (much less ten lines!)
We can largely ignore the question of whether or not content owners in the fields of medicine and pharmacology can use a "no fair use" policy to suppress information those who fund the research consider "adverse" -- that information is more likely to be suppressed before publication, and never brought before the review committee who will question the validity of the research aims, methods, data, and conclusions. While the thought of suppressed adverse information is scary, information that has not been published does not affect whether or not content licensing policy can affect the care we receive.
Where content licensing policy does comes into play is when someone wants or needs to provide a group of people with take-home copies of previously-published information, and that information is either a small portion of a much larger publication -- such as several pages from a book, or one paper out of an entire conference -- or it is out of print. In these cases, the presenter needs to contact the publisher's copyright office, get clearance to use the information in the proposed context, and pay the publisher's rates for reprints -- even if those reprints are just cheap xerox copies of the original. At going rates of $10 or more per copy for the first 10 pages, the costs can add up quickly. Much the same as with Jill's DVD quandry, the presenter has the choice of paying the cost for the reprints (or requiring the audience to pay those costs), reworking the information in a manner that does not require licensing, or not using the information at all. In short, if the cost of furnishing that information is prohibitive, those whose lives may depend on having that information... will not get it. (Or they will not get it legally.)
Some would argue against the fairness of having to pay content creators to disseminate their information to a greater audience, or to have to pay for information that could mean the difference between life and death. Yet that is what we do every time we see the doctor, visit the CDE, subscribe to the health magazine. While there are options content creators can choose to make to make access to our own work more accessible and less expensive, that is a matter of individual choice and personal (or corporate) ethics.
On the other hand, to deliberately deprive a content owner of recompense just because their asking price is beyond our willingness or ability to pay... that's just not fair...
