Welcome to a COVID 19 edition of copyright chat. I'm Sara Benson and today I don't have a guest. It's a little hard to have guests nowadays when we're all standing six feet apart. But today I'm going to expound on fair use in the age of COVID 19 and I hope you'll join me and maybe even learn a few things today. So what has brought us here, obviously the world is in a disaster right now. I mean it's a pandemic. It's a global nightmare. I was supposed to travel to the American library association meeting. I was supposed to travel to the digital symposium in San Diego. All of my travel has been canceled and I am currently under quarantine by the governor's order. But what does this mean for copyright? Of course, we're in an age where copyright is really easy to gain and it's lasts for a very long time.

And as I like to tell my students and other professors and even other copyright librarians because we've struck that balance in terms of long copyright and easy to obtain copyright. We also have the public benefit weighing on the other side with multiple copyright exceptions including section 108 including fair use section 107 well which is a limitation, not an exception but and also the exception for face to face teaching and distance learning under the TEACH Act. I want to say one note about the Teach Act. I wrote a medium article, I'll link to it from this podcast post criticizing the copyright office blog. They recently asked a lawyer to vocalize support for using the TEACH Act section 110(2). In these times of uncertainty when moving your courses online rapidly, I think that that recommendation is laughable at best.

Why? Because most copyright librarians know that the TEACH Act is not a useful act. It is so burdensome on the copyright user, on the person who is trying to teach online that most of the requirements render it meaningless. For instance, you are supposed to immediately take down any copyrighted works that you use, say in a PowerPoint as you're teaching. But at the university of Illinois, at the school of information science for instance, we record all of our online teaching sessions and we leave them available for students who couldn't attend class, which is even more important today in the age of COVID 19 where many students are moving to their homes, away from their college dorm or college apartment. Maybe they're ill, maybe they have COVID 19, maybe they are mentally not handling things very well. Maybe they have a high level of anxiety which is interfering with their ability to concentrate.

Whatever the reason our students may not be able to attend class during the regularly scheduled time and having those resources, those class sessions recorded available online for them to watch later is really important. Especially important right now during the era of social distancing. And so the teach act does not allow for that. It says that we have to, you know, delete anything we've made. We can't allow the students to access that material after class. The class session and there are a host of other requirements such as using anti-circumvention technology and also instructing students and professors about copyright and having a university copyright policy. A lot of these things are just not in place. And so I would say that it is not helpful to suggest that people scramble to try to use that the teach act in these times. Instead, what we should really be focusing on is empowering people to use what they already have their fair use rights.

And that is what a group of copyright librarians nationwide and myself included have advocated. So we've written a statement in favor of a broader use of fair use in this time for teaching and learning and research and scholarship purposes. And the rationale is fairly simple, right? It's that we can't use our normal practices. I've never in my life experienced something so different and so abnormal as this quarantine. And in this time of the quarantine, my library services