Licences and exceptions for routine copying
Much copying of published material needs no request of its own: a legal exception such as fair use or fair dealing, a collective or organisational licence, or the licence a document such as a guideline or a website carries can already cover it, and each covers only the copying its terms, territory and purpose reach.
What copyright exceptions allow
A certain amount of copying is legally acceptable, and because there is rarely anything completely original in what anyone writes, the issue in copyright is how much of a source it is legally permissible to use.
In the view of one US intellectual property lawyer, quoted in 2009, what may legally be taken from the web depends on what is taken, why it is taken, who takes it and what technology is used, and a writer employed in a for-profit enterprise should be careful of invoking fair use as a reflexive defence, because fair use is typically not available to them.
A 2008 guide to scanning and downloading articles into a personal digital library warns that doing so has to stay within copyright law, and states that in the United States fair use permits reproduction for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching including multiple copies for classroom use, scholarship and research, provided the use is neither commercial nor for profit; it points to a university library's tools and guidelines for applying the doctrine. The same guide states that in the United Kingdom scanning is allowed under fair dealing but only for private study or non-commercial research, and that further dissemination is prohibited.
In the United Kingdom, the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498), which implemented EU Directive 2001/29/EC and came into force on 31 October 2003, modified the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to take account of electronic publishing and other forms of presenting information. They removed some exceptions to copyright, including fair dealing and library privileges, for copying carried out for commercial purposes, so that from that date limited copying without the copyright holder's consent was prevented when done for a commercial purpose, even for research or private study. For non-commercial copying, the rules on the amount that can be copied, the requirement for it to be fair dealing, and the need to sign a declaration remained as before.
According to guidance notes issued by the British Library and the Copyright Licensing Agency, as reported in 2007, "commercial" means directly or indirectly income-generating rather than just profit-making, so it will probably encompass far more activities than are normally considered likely. On that reading, writing for any organisation that expects to generate income from the writer's contributions is commercial, and so are research by a university research student that a commercial organisation sponsors and publishing a paper in a publication that will earn royalties or other income at a later stage.
Photocopying source material for current or later use is often done with a view to private study alone, but in 2007 it was a matter of legal debate whether copying material that is to be the basis for writing new material counts as private use.
Collective licences
The UK Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) was created in 1982 to provide a simple method of obtaining authorisation to copy without contacting the author or copyright holder individually on each occasion. It licenses users to copy extracts from books, journals, magazines and periodicals, collects fees from them for doing so, distributes the fees to authors, publishers and artists, and institutes legal proceedings against those it believes to be in breach of copyright. In 2007 it was owned by its members, the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society and the Publishers Licensing Society, representing 120,000 authors and 1,500 book, journal, magazine and periodical publishers.
The CLA recommends that any organisation that photocopies or scans copyright works should have a licence, as should any organisation that makes multiple copies or distributes copies internally. Business licences were then granted according to the type of business and the number of employees, and in return any organisation could copy prescribed amounts from over 3 million UK titles and from 16 million titles from a range of countries worldwide, with reciprocal agreements between the CLA and other countries permitting access to a wide number of other countries' works.
In May 2004 the CLA and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) introduced a model licence for pharmaceutical companies that permits unlimited photocopying, scanning and email delivery of articles from books, magazines, journals and periodicals, removing the need for member companies to seek additional clearances through the CLA's Rapid Clearance Service. It also permits systematic electronic storage of electronic copies of certain materials on a company intranet, international distribution to affiliated companies, and the supply of copies to regulatory authorities when submitting marketing authorisation applications.
The nonprofit Copyright Clearance Center, described in 2008 as the world's largest provider of text-licensing solutions, had by then introduced an annual copyright licence for academic institutions and was assembling a repertory of books and other works frequently used in coursepacks, electronic reserves, research collaboration and course-management systems; a copyright holder could list works with it at no charge on a non-exclusive basis.
Confirming documentation against journal articles, books or online content may require a fee to the copyright holder, and the Copyright Clearance Center can be contacted for information on how to legally archive and distribute copyrighted materials.
What an organisation's licence reaches
In a 2007 case study, staff of Eisai's US medical communications department reported that the department had held a domestic licence with the Copyright Clearance Center, then a US service coordinating rights, permissions and royalty payments for almost 10,000 publications, under which staff could share research and product-related literature only with some colleagues elsewhere in the United States. They could not send those files to Eisai in the United Kingdom or Japan and remain compliant with international agreements for the protection of intellectual property, so each Eisai location paid distribution and royalty fees separately for the same journal articles and conference abstracts.
The remedy was a pair of multinational licence agreements extending the annual copyright licence to employees outside the United States. A working group of the medical communications department, the legal department and the company's research librarian arranged them with colleagues in all three countries and a representative of the licensor, which agreed that the US holding company would serve as the corporate headquarters for the purpose of obtaining global copyright licences. Fees were based on the number of full-time research employees in each country and shared among the global affiliates. The two agreements were signed in November 2005. Digital coverage was not available as a stand-alone without photocopy coverage, so the company took both a multinational photocopy licence and a multinational digital amendment. Eisai was one of several pharmaceutical companies to obtain global copyright coverage through such multinational licence agreements.
Under the agreements, employees worldwide could lawfully email industry news and scientific articles to coworkers, distribute journal articles and abstracts at internal meetings, post industry research on corporate intranets, print and photocopy journal articles to share with colleagues, and download content for use in company presentations. Employees had to check the licensor's database to verify title and permission coverage for each journal article before sharing it, and that check was a primary requirement of the agreements. The one notable exception was the sales force, which was excluded from direct access to the publications both under the agreements and under the guidance of US and international regulators on promotion of marketed products, so sales representatives had to contact medical communications with questions about literature they were not allowed to distribute to health care professionals.
The department reported that sharing literature globally saved it almost $2,000 on document delivery when the first quarter of 2006 was compared with the same quarter of 2005, and 80 fewer items were ordered through document delivery vendors, with similar monthly savings and staff time savings expected to continue.
Licences carried by guidelines and websites
Many websites contain copyright declarations that require users to abide by their terms, and a 2007 account of UK law for medical writers holds that such a declaration in effect acts as a licence between the copyright holder and the user.
The ICH E6(R3) guideline is published under a public licence: with the exception of the ICH logo, the document may be used, reproduced, incorporated into other works, adapted, modified, translated or distributed, provided ICH's copyright is acknowledged at all times. Any adaptation, modification or translation must take reasonable steps to clearly label, demarcate or otherwise identify that changes were made to or based on the original, and any impression that ICH endorses or sponsors the changed version must be avoided. The document is provided as is without warranty of any kind, and neither ICH nor the authors of the original document are liable for any claim, damages or other liability arising from its use. The permission does not extend to content supplied by third parties, for which permission for reproduction must be obtained from that copyright holder.