0.4 Managing rights  (Page 4/11)

Use rights in the agreement

Licensing agreements often contain clauses that reserve to the licensor the exclusive right to all uses of copyrighted works that are not specifically mentioned in the agreement. A licensee should therefore think of all possible uses that it might want to make of a copyrighted work before it engages in negotiations. These  use rights  provisions are the most important part of a licensing agreement because they control what the agreement actually allows the licensee to do.

Where an electronic resource is concerned, some basic use rights might include: searching or browsing the database, viewing and downloading material, forwarding articles to others, printing materials, and including a listing of the works and possibly their abstracts in the library’s own catalogue. A library that is affiliated with an educational institution may also want to make sure that a license allows faculty and staff to place materials in electronic reserves, include them in course packs, and distribute and/or display portions of the materials in lectures or other speaking engagements.

Further, while the practice of loaning materials to other libraries or sharing a reasonable amount of materials with colleagues for scholarly purposes is implied in some jurisdictions by law, a licensee cannot normally share copyrighted materials for commercial purposes. If a licensee wishes to do so, it will have to negotiate for the right and include it in the agreement. If modifying a work in order to abide by local norms is necessary, a library should make sure that the modification does not conflict with the author’s moral rights.

On one final issue, the licensee should be especially careful. Many license agreements have the effect of displacing the general set of exceptions and limitations (discussed at length in  Module 4 ) pertaining to the works covered by the license. Thus, the licensee should not assume that it will continue to enjoy the use rights created by those exceptions and limitations. If the license wishes to retain them, it must insist upon inclusion in the license agreement of a provision preserving those rights.

Other conditions on licensed uses

A licensor might want to limit certain uses by location or frequency of access. In return for the right to unlimited printing of the copyrighted material, for example, a licensor might want additional compensation. In this event, a licensee can negotiate for the right to charge its patrons fees to recover copying or printing costs. A library should also determine who its users are going to be and where they will be able to access a given resource. For example, it may wish its users to be able to access the copyrighted material from any computer or only from computers located in the library. It should also decide whether access to the copyrighted material or certain uses of it will require a password or will be open to any member of the public.

Licensor obligations

Licensor obligations are the duties a licensor has to her licensee. This clause is particularly important for electronic resources.