Paul Pedley's most recent practitioner‐oriented book picks up where his previous ones left off. Essential Law for Information Professionals (Pedley, 2006) and Digital Copyright (Pedley, 2007) were valuable guides for librarians and information workers, but they could be viewed as expositions of a given body of legal material. They did not so readily answer the practitioner's next question, which was “That gives me an impressive body of knowledge – but what do I actually do about all that legal stuff now?”
This recent book tries to answer that question: it helps you work out and then take many of those practical steps which will help you stay within the law. The layout of the book is quite striking, with three sections, a brief exposition of copyright (only 20 pages – if you want more, read the other two books), followed by the two main blocks straddling over a hundred pages. Part 1 is entitled “Copyright infringement and what happens when things go wrong”, Part 2 “How to stay within copyright law”.
This book could be called “copyright for grown ups”: it says clear, simple things that help clarify practice for those who work in the real world. Many information professionals approach copyright looking for black and white certainties. Paul Pedley responds to this early on: “it is not possible to give black and white statements relating to copyright compliance that apply in all circumstances”. If that was not bad enough, he then cuts to the chase and describes what will happen to when the law is broken – hence the chapter heading “What happens when things go wrong”. This may scare some librarians (“We’re only on page 24 and he's telling me what happens when you make a mistake. I only want to hear about not making mistakes!”). Too bad – copyright is for grown ups!
Pedley confronts the frightened librarian's concerns 13 pages later at the start of chapter 4: he says that, because there is uncertainty, “we have to think of copyright compliance as being a question of risk management”. Realistically, when you cannot avoid risk, you have to manage it instead. And in order to clarify the process of risk management, he gives a very valuable account of some “copyright cases and what we can learn from them” in chapter 5 – practical accounts of real outcomes that give you a clear idea of the risks of taking certain copyright decisions. This is much more useful than statements of principles and legal generalisations.
Having confronted you with the reality of copyright law, the final section gives you methods for risk managing your copyright situation as effectively as possible. This section might seem perverse in that it includes explanations of issues such as US fair use and the “PNAM” tests in an account aimed at the UK library world. However, in practice this is invaluable – US law so dominates the global digital environment, that often rights holders, authors and legislators seem to assume that no other jurisdictions exist. Anyone who has had to tell a visiting US academic to a British university how their digital copying will have to be scaled down to the restrictive UK environment will welcome such an elegant account of US law.
This work might strike some readers as bitty and lacking in cohesion, failing to make links between areas of similarity and avoiding the inference of general principles. In fact, if this is so, it is simply because it reflects the nature of UK copyright law, especially with regard to electronic copying. One can only point at certain scenarios and leave the librarian to draw their own conclusions and establish their own practice: to repeat what was said earlier, “it is not possible to give black and white statements relating to copyright compliance that apply in all circumstances”. We should not look for magisterial statements when magisterial statements are not appropriate.
Finally, mention should be made of the existence of the companion website “Keeping within the law” www.kwtl.co.uk, maintained by Paul Pedley and published by Facet, which effectively keeps updating the contents of this book with the latest developments, cases and legislation. The advantages of using such a site in preference to a print work fixed in time are obvious. But unless one works for an organisation prepared to stump up several hundreds of pound for an annual subscription, this monograph will still be a very attractive proposition for any librarian wishing to take practical steps to say within copyright law.
