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Student Newspaper Archives, Fair Use, Licensing, and the DMCA

We are uncertain how to proceed with further digitization of our college’s student newspapers. Currently, the newspapers published between 1948 and 2016 are digitized. They were made available online through a page hosted on the college’s website as well as the NYS Historic Newspapers database.

Since the mid-2010s, articles from the newspaper have been published simultaneously online and in the print edition distributed across campus.

The college’s administration received a complaint from a company called Copytrack regarding two images used in past issues of the paper. The college’s response was to scrub the images from the online archive of past issues and restrict access to the archives, effectively removing the entire digitized collection of its archives from the newspaper’s website.

However, since the issues in question were from 2017 and 2018, the digitized collection still remains intact on NYS Historic Newspapers, where the library has it hosted. We’re uncertain what weight this complaint from Copytrack holds and hope to digitize the remainder of the publication soon, within the bounds of copyright restrictions.

After this copyright complaint, is it advisable to leave the collection in NYS Historic Newspapers and continue adding to it, or should we plan to take it down and only digitize future copies for in-house preservation purposes?
Academic Libraries Remediating “Born PDFs”

We currently offer a service that collects older static PDFs of library/research content and provide faculty with a URL (or permalink) to that resource in our library’s digital collections. This service provides the following enhancements:

  • Increases accessibility as links will always test as accessible in Brightspace (DLE/LMS)
  • Enhance student discovery of library resources.
  • Provide more accurate usage metrics that influence library subscription decisions.

Occasionally, we come across an old scanned PDF of a book chapter or scholarly article that we do not subscribe to.

Our question is: If we publicly offer to remediate (as best we can) published content that we do not subscribe to or own so that faculty can place an accessible version of them in their course shells, are we violating copyright? Keep in mind these materials would only be shared with students of specific courses and would be available only through the learning management system that requires a login.