A response to Bernard Naylor’s opinion paper

Addresses the proposals regarding payment by users for electronic access to published material, put forward in the opinion paper titled “Paying for scholarly communication: the future as a guide to the past”. Warns that this paper argues against the continuing tenability, in an electronic environment, of the current legal exceptions to copyright,namely “fair dealing” and the so‐called library exemptions, suggesting instead that, in return for explicit rights from publishers, the existing rights of individuals and libraries conferred by these two exceptions should be lost. Rejects as unacceptable any such change to existing UK copyright law.