Copyright in Cyberspace: Questions and Answers for Librarians.

Authoritative and useful works for librarians about the Internet and copyright require that the authors have the legal knowledge, library experience, and technical expertise necessary to interpret the complicated material governing intellectual property and its use in the electronic environment. Hoffman appears to have all three skills. At the time of publication, she was about to receive her law degree from the University of Texas and join a prestigious law firm as an associate in their intellectual property and technology section. She had already published in the legal literature on the subject of intellectual property and served the Texas Library Association as a legal assistant on the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA). She earned her master's of information science degree in 1992 and worked for six years as a reference librarian and then coordinator of library instruction in large academic libraries prior to pursuing her law degree. She demonstrates a thorough understanding of computer technology and the Internet throughout this valuable book, particularly in the chapter on Internet basics, which explains with amazing clarity how computers manage information coming from the Web and how these workings may relate to copyright issues.

The goals of Copyright in Cyberspace are stated in the Preface: “1. To provide a general understanding of copyright law as it relates to the librarian's use of the Internet; 2. To provide an awareness of the issues that the Internet brings to bear on copyright law, the fact that most of these issues are undecided, and that how they are decided is of the utmost importance to the future of libraries and library users; and 3. To inspire a sense of responsibility for helping our society and its decision makers to resolve those issues” (p. xiv). While the author states later in the book that she has taken a “rather neutral approach on copyright” (p.145), it is clear from this statement of goals that she does not view copyright as a neutral arena. Because she sees many of the issues related to copyright and the Internet as unresolved, Hoffman takes every opportunity to urge librarians to become active in, “standing up for the rights of information users.” She ends the first part of her book with a stirring quote from Ray Patterson, taken from an interview and available on an American Library Association (ALA) Web page, in which he states that, “librarians are the last line of defense against the efforts of publishers to sacrifice the right of the people to know” [1].

This book is divided into four parts. Part I provides background on copyright law and other recent legislation and on the way in which the Internet and users' computers handle information. Particularly important to all subsequent discussion is this part's third chapter, which covers fair use and other statutory exceptions and protections for libraries. Part II applies these legalities to many situations common to the use of information on the Internet. For example, the author explains how hyperlinking, framing, browsing, downloading, and using digital images may be impacted by copyright provisions and case law. Part III covers specific library applications such as libraries as content providers through their own Web pages, interlibrary loan and resource sharing over the Internet, electronic reserves, and distance education. Part IV contains many of the sources and resources relevant to these discussions, including excerpts from the Copyright Act of 1976 and Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) guidelines. Other examples range from the guidelines related to interlibrary loan from the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU), to ALA model policies, to ways to seek permission for use from copyright holders and to protect copyrighted works and the names, addresses, and Web addresses of organizations concerned with copyright and libraries.

Throughout this book the author uses a question-and-answer structure, posing the kinds of questions that librarians might ask, then responding to them, often citing cases and decisions that relate to the questions. This approach seems to be quite effective. In many instances, particular key issues are stressed by featuring a question and answer framed in a box on the page. The author continually stresses that there are few absolutes in this new territory, where a law written before microcomputers came into use must be applied to the world of the Internet and ubiquitous computer availability. For this reason, so many legal cases must be used and analyzed for their meaning in the context of the issues facing libraries. In nearly every case, the cited legal actions do not specifically relate to libraries as either plaintiffs or defendants. This adds to the difficulty in presenting unequivocal answers and the necessity that librarians become involved in the political arena in defense of users' rights to information. The necessity to follow case law also means that at any time there could be a new case that would render current opinion and practice invalid. Despite this possibility, this book is a most useful guide to librarians in the volatile area of the use of electronic information. One hopes that the principles derived from the growing body of decisions will continue to be applicable for some time. However, new legislation could at any time easily turn the balance of the rights of the holders of copyright and of the users of information over the Internet in new directions that would severely limit fair use and other exceptions currently enjoyed by users and libraries. The author feels that without vigilance and effective lobbying the so-called “right to read” could be replaced by a “pay-per-use” system, and that fair use under the copyright law could be supplanted by licensing agreements that strictly limit, through contracts, the use of “published” materials.

While Copyright in Cyberspace clearly is written from the perspective of and for the use of academic librarians, it is very useful for health sciences librarians in either academic or hospital settings. Hoffman's style helps make this book very readable, and even some of her personality seems to come through, so that her enthusiasm and commitment enliven a potentially very dry topic. The only slight criticism concerns the issue of licensing of electronic information, which receives very little attention. Perhaps that is because another book in the NetGuide series appears to address this specifically. That book is Interpreting and Negotiating Licensing Agreements: A Guidebook for the Library, Research, and Teaching Professions by Arlene Bielefield and Lawrence Cheeseman.