The publisher John Wiley has lost a court battle over the copying practices of a patent law-firm that had assembled a private library of copies of scientific articles for the purpose of researching patent applications. Initially, Wiley had sued over the use of copies of scientific articles in patent applications, but the US Patent and Trademark Office pre-empted that suit by issuing a directive declaring such copies to be fair use. Wiley switched its legal theory, suing over the assembly of the library, and US Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Keyes ruled (PDF) that this was also fair use, since the USPTO requires lawyers to consult the literature before filing. It's likely that Wiley will appeal to the district court.
“These are not the acts of a ‘chiseler,’” Keyes ruled at the conclusion of a four-part fair-use analysis, noting that the patent lawyers’ use of the work was transformative and did not impinge on the original market for scholarly journals. He also wrote that the lawyers’ copying of the work did not prevent a fair-use finding (an argument that could help Google in its long-running fight over book-scanning).
Judge says patent lawyers have right to science articles under ‘fair use’ [Jeff John Roberts/GigaOm]
(via Techdirt)
(Image: A photocopier-thing, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from torley's photostream)
