In a closely watched copyright-infringement lawsuit, Georgia State University fired back this week at its accusers, three academic publishers that say the institution invites students to illegally download and print readings from thousands of works. The university asserts that its online distribution of course material is permitted under copyright law's fair-use exemption.
Georgia State made its case in papers filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Atlanta.
The three publishers—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications—sued the university in federal court in April, arguing that course readings that professors and librarians disseminated online infringed publishers' copyrights.
The publishers are asking a judge to order Georgia State to stop distributing course material in that way.
The university admits that it was offering the material online to students through the following means: electronic reserves in the library, the Blackboard/WebCT Vista course-management system, department Web pages, and other Web sites. But the university says the practice is allowed under the fair-use doctrine of the Copyright Act.
Fair use is a vague area of the law that generally allows people to make use of copyrighted material without seeking permission from the owner if the material is used for scholarship, teaching, or review.
But fair-use guidelines also advise people to consider the amount of material they're copying in deciding whether to seek owners' permission. The publishers have argued that Georgia's dissemination of online material was "systematic" and "widespread," and involved "vast amounts of copyrighted work," and therefore fell outside the scope of fair use.
In addition to advancing its fair-use argument, the university also says it is protected from federal lawsuits under the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a doctrine known as state sovereign immunity.
The outcome of the lawsuit could have consequences for how colleges throughout the country distribute course material online. Publishers and colleges have been tussling for years about whether and under what circumstances colleges can make publishers' electronic material available to students.
