LICENSING

There is evidence that one can license away one's Fair Use rights. For example, a library's ability to participate in interlibrary loan (ILL) by providing photocopies of articles from a journal to which it subscribes to another library has been defended within Fair Use.

There is a school of thought that argues the opposite, however--that one cannot sign away a federally-granted right. Court cases are unclear, but majority opinion and evidence point toward the former.

Many of today's databases contain the full text of articles from journals. In most cases, the license the library signs with the database vendor prohibits the library from printing copies of articles from the database and providing that copy to another library via ILL.

In these cases, we have licensed away our Fair Use rights.

A professor who purchases a videotape or a piece of software may have signed away his or her Fair Use rights with respect to the video when he or she signed the purchase order or broke the seal on the package.