I’ve had several problems with the CCC over the years, and this isn’t helping…
As I was reading Roy Kaufmann’s testimony on behalf of the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at the recent Congressional hearing on “Copyright Issues in Education and for the Visually Impaired,” I was struck by CCC’s boilerplate statement that it “was created at the suggestion of Congress in order to help clear photocopy permissions.” You can find this in other places. For example, CCC claimed in its response to a 2012 “Notice of Inquiry Concerning Orphan Works and Mass Digitization” that “CCC was created at the suggestion of Congress in the legislative history of the Copyright Act of 1976.” I haven’t been able to pin down the earliest use of this assertion, but it appears to date from the late 1980s.
It is easy to understand why CCC would want to claim it has a Congressional mandate for its programs. But is the claim accurate? Did Congress suggest that CCC be created?
The answer is unequivocally “no.” A Congressional committee did suggest that it thought a voluntary licensing scheme would be desirable, but it never suggested that CCC was the form that such a scheme should take.
Read the full article @ Library Law Blog.
