Copyright training in the corporate world: employee mistakes can lead to infringement. Infringement can lead to lawsuits. Lawsuits can cost millions. A little education can save a lot of trouble

Information Outlook, June, 2007 by Doug Black

"Wait, you mean I can't just take an article off the Internet and email it? But I thought anything on the Internet is public?"

"If someone emails me an article then it's OK for me to send it to someone else, right?"

"I thought if we have a licensing agreement with a publisher we can use it any way we want. So you're saying I can email an article to people who work here but not to customers? And I can use it in a presentation but I can't put it on our intranet?"

"I thought our annual copyright license means we can use any content from any journal we subscribe to. Now you're saying we also have licensing agreements directly with some publishers that give us other rights too?"

"If I source the information then I'm OK with copyright, right?"

"I don't know if we have a license to use this content but I've got to get these articles out to my customers right now. Anyway, there's not much at stake even if I did get caught."

Sound familiar? No doubt you and every other corporate librarian have heard a lot of these questions many times. So have the people who manage copyright training and education programs. In large part, employees' lack of copyright knowledge reflects changes brought on by the Internet. Copyrighted works are readily available in multiple hard copy and electronic formats and can be easily copied and distributed from the desktop in multiple ways. It's difficult for knowledge workers to know when they're standing on solid copyright ground.

"In many cases, copyright infringement isn't deliberate or malicious, it's just that so many people go through life without being exposed to copyright education," says Maury M. Tepper, III, an intellectual property lawyer with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, in Raleigh, North Carolina, who has represented hundreds of clients and also worked on the corporate side in the pharmaceutical industry.

"Of course, lots of infringement goes on because people don't bother or care about permissions; or they copy and email the content anyway because they need to share it with co-workers. But by and large, copyright is a black hole of knowledge for many people."

At Copyright Clearance Center, we regularly talk with corporations about their copyright training efforts. This responsibility typically falls to corporate librarians, content managers, and corporate counsel, or a combination of all three. Many report that helping employees use content lawfully has become increasingly difficult.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has caused more confusion than clarification," says a senior librarian at a global, U.S.-based technology company with nearly 20,000 employees. "We've had to put the copyright training focus on how to work with digital content--and that means everything from using licensed databases, to purchased PDFs, to Web content."

She says the company's younger workers have relatively low knowledge of copyright, having recently emerged from the lenient, or unsupervised, copyright environment of academia. "We are hiring a lot of college grads this year and, according to our academic library colleagues, the mood among college kids is that if it's on the Web, then you can copy and paste at will without sourcing. We've got a lot of work to do to educate these folks."

This phenomenon is confirmed by a recent study from industry analyst group Outsell. Younger workers came of age after the advent of the Internet, which made content widely available in digital form without the intermediation of a librarian. Thus, the content-use equation has lost the one person most likely to have a strong understanding of copyright.

But uncertainty about copyright can also prevail among veteran employees. "We actually get more surprises from some of the older employees than our newer ones," says Jenna Oliver, MLS, copyright compliance officer in the Copyright Compliance Office at Boeing. "The young people we hire seem to have more awareness of intellectual property as a whole; they seem to have had more IP training in college. Things were different 25 years ago. Librarians and copy shops handed out content to the students in hard copy, and they took care of the copyright issues. So with some of our veteran employees, the first time they're told they need to get permission to use external content they can be a little surprised."

A growing number of companies appear to be becoming more vigilant about copyright via education and training--and, in some cases, adoption of new technology. This stems from a dual-sided incentive that couples a positive motivation to do the right thing along with aversion to the risk of doing the wrong.

At a fundamental level, many IP-rich companies appreciate that the Golden Rule applies to copyright. These are companies whose intellectual property is their most valuable asset, and they protect it aggressively. At the same time, they realize they could expose themselves to perceptions of hypocrisy if they accused a company of, say, violating its patent while letting their own employees share copyrighted articles without authorization.