We’ve talked about this before, but it’s good to get a quick refresher. Copyright is not a fun idea, a nice thing to do if we remember it. It is FEDERAL LAW.

And we generally remember to chat about this when something big hits the news – but this is important every day.

Library staff, especially school library staff, need to know that a teacher cannot just copy an article and give it out to every student. An academic library needs to know they cannot order one copy of a journal, scan it, and distribute it to people across the campus. You need to know that you cannot show just any video in class. Images found on the web that are nice/useful/super-cute cannot be added to your website, newsletter, or classroom material.

And I’m slightly shocked this was not commonly known, but I’m coming from the biased position of BEING A LIBRARIAN and knowing that you CANNOT SHOW A VIDEO WITHOUT GETTING PERMISSION FROM THE OWNER!

Yeesh – this is basic.

And why is the the case? Let’s say I make a movie here in the office, all about the joys of libraries. I spend a bunch of money making it, and I need to recoup my costs. Plus, it was a lot of work and I deserve to get paid for coming up with the idea, organizing it all, and creating that movie.

So, I’m selling my movie. Great. It’s becoming popular, with library fans across the country buying it, then after they love it they tell a friend that they want to buy a copy too. My future as a movie maker is really coming along great!

BUT!

Some people aren’t doing this.

A library can, and should, buy a license that lets public performance of specific movies or from specific studios happen. Without doing that – without paying for a public performance – showing a movie is a violation of copyright law.

It doesn’t matter if you personally bought a DVD. That only gives a license to show the movie in your own home, to your family and a few friends. It very specifically, very definitely, no-question-at-all does NOT give permission to show my movie to a group of people.

And that makes sense. If someone shows my movie to a bunch of people, now they aren’t going to buy it. One person bought a copy, but my revenue from all those other people is gone. I have been financially damaged.

So you may have seen the story about the PTA in California that showed a DVD of the Lion King. They were doing a school fundraiser, more power to them!, and made about $800. No word on how this hit the news, but it’s a nice feel-good story that people would want to share.

Except.

They violated copyright law. And they got nailed by the organization that oversees public viewings.

And they owed a $250 fine. (Really – they got off easy with that.)

This blew up, and the story became about the big mean Disney corporation stole money from a poor little school.

Except.

That’s not what happened.

That school violated copyright laws. They were caught and punished. Disney, and the organization that oversees their licensing laws, was entirely 100% legally in the right here.

Are copyright law overly restrictive, onerous, and written to wildly favor rich creators? Absolutely. I will be happy to rail for HOURS about how evil Disney is, how terribly and unfairly restrictive our copyright laws are, and how the effect is to stifle free exchange of ideas. FOR HOURS I WILL DO THIS!

But – it’s still the law. And when we knowing or unknowingly break the law, there are consequences. Nobody goes to copyright jail, thankfully; but the financial costs can be pretty extreme.

So keep up on the basics of copyright. Know where some potential danger areas are for your patrons and your organization. Be ready to proactively get out there and help people to follow the laws and to make better decisions!

There was a happy ending here for the school. The CEO of Disney was so embarrassed by the terrible publicity of a multi-billion dollar company taking money from a nice little school, that he agreed to make a donation to the school.

Let’s not put ourselves in a position to need the charity of a CEO. Let’s be sure we are following the laws. (And advocating for better laws to be enacted!)

Update:

Here is some basic information on fair use of copyrighted materials, from the US Copyright Office! “Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides the statutory framework for determining whether something is a fair use and identifies certain types of uses—such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research—as examples of activities that may qualify as fair use.”

We have really enjoyed meeting with so many of you, in visits to your library, in training sessions, and at our member events!

Join us! We have a few events coming up, and you know things are always better when you join us! We will have all these events here on our website, and if you want other reminders you can join our Meetup.com group: Relaxed Readers. You can download their app and find out not only about our events, but all sorts of other events you might enjoy.

• Book Group Discussion: Wednesday, February 12 5:30, Mexican Village, St. Cloud

Join us for chatting about books – any books that you are enjoying! Bring a book, or just bring yourself. We’ll enjoy dinner, sharing books, and getting to know each other!

Let’s enjoy some hygge time – keep the cold and dark outside, while we enjoy the warmth, light, food, and good book conversation inside!

• We’re talking books: Monday Feb 17, 10:00 Coffee Corner, Princeton

Join us for chatting about books – any books that you are enjoying! Bring a book, or just bring yourself. We’ll enjoy coffee and snacks, sharing books, and getting to know each other! If any of our St Cloud members want to carpool, let us know!

• Read Your Book Session: Thurs Feb 27, 6:00, food court at Crossroads Mall

Did you set a New Year’s resolution to read more books? Do you just like to read books – but you are always scrambling to make time?

We get it. It’s hard to find the time. But we have an answer for you! Join us to enjoy some reading time! We aren’t going to talk, we aren’t going to analyze our book with others, we aren’t going to share plot points. We are going just sit. And read. And enjoy ourselves!

• Author Event: Tue March 10, 7:00pm St Ben’s

Susan Steinberg: 2020 McNeely Creative Writer in Residence

This is another author event at St. Benedict’s College. We are meeting up there, and can sit together for this author presentation. Susan Steinberg’s first novel Machine will be published by Graywolf in August 2019. She is also author of the story collections Spectacle (Graywolf), Hydroplane (FC2), and The End of Free Love (FC2).

It has been so great to be with the CMLE community of library people!! I truly love being part of such an interesting community of library people, from all over the place, who share ideas about the cool and interesting things they are doing.

And it was THREE YEARS AGO last week that we had our first member event – going to dinner. You guys have built on that first try, and continued to grow with all kinds of good opportunities to connect and share ideas.

We are continuing to have all sorts of fun events!

Tuesday evening, members went to an author’s presentation at St. Ben’s college. The author was poet Sally Wen Mao. Her latest book is called Oculus: Poems.

This was so interesting! I am not a “poetry” person, but I so enjoyed listening to Ms Mao talking about her process of finding information for her poems. I had never heard of a process of developing poetry like this, and it was really fascinating!

(And on a side note – I was so tired last night after a couple of really stressful/busy weeks, and though I had been looking forward to it, if this had not been a member event I would have chosen to go home and to bed. I am so glad I went!!! All the happiness research says to push yourself into these kinds of events – so if you are feeling uncertain about trying a new thing: try it! Hopefully you will have fun too!)

From Amazon.com: “In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.”

From the St Johns/St Bens press release:

“Many people might not recall who Anna May Wong was.

Wong was considered the first Chinese American movie star, and through her films, public appearances and prominent magazine features, she helped to humanize Chinese Americans to white audiences during a period of overt racism and discrimination. Following her death in 1961, Wong’s image remained a symbol in literature as well as in film.

That’s where poet Sally Wen Mao picked up the trail. Mao wrote a book called “Oculus,” published in 2019 by Minneapolis’ Graywolf Press, with a series of persona poems in Wong’s voice.”

And, it may not seem like a big deal – but the event served nice little desserts and fruit. The moderator of the event invited everyone to enjoy our experience a little more by getting a dessert and coffee or tea. What a nice idea!!

It was already a special event, and a lovely evening. Add in some pineapple, lemon cake, and nice tea – and it was just great. We sat together, enjoyed our cake and beverages, and had a lovely time listening to a very interesting author!

Do you want to have a fun evening with us??? Great!

Our next member events are here:

• book group discussion, Wednesday Feb. 12, 5:30 at Mexican Village in St Cloud
• book group discussion, Monday Feb 17, 10:30 at Coffee Corner in Princeton
• individual reading time, Thursday Feb 27, 6:00 in the food court of Crossroads Mall in St Cloud. Bring a book to read!

Join us! We will be so happy to see you, and it will be great to have time with your colleagues!

Welcome back to Season Six of Linking Our Libraries!

Check out our show notes page, to get links to some other useful resources, and the links for the books we discuss this week.

This week we look at a skill used in a lot of libraries: Genealogy work!

This week we have a new Guest Host: Wendy Sykes from the Great River Regional Library System.

Genealogy is the study of families and lineages. You can look at your own family, or at people from your community. In our multitype system, we have public libraries that help people in their genealogy work looking at their own family, and we have history centers that look at genealogies from across entire communities. There are academic libraries that store work from families who donate materials to collections, and could be used for genealogy.

Hello to our member library people!

We are a multitype library system, serving libraries of all sorts. We cover twelve counties, serving every library in those counties: Aitkin, Benton, Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Pine, Sherburne, Stearns, Todd and Wright.

We are one of seven multitype library systems across the state.
Currently, our two public library members are considering proposals to dissolve CMLE as it is now. It would be replaced with a plan that would move CMLE into Great River library system, and start another multitype library system in the East Central library system.

Services CMLE would provide are not set yet – this is still in early planning stages; but we would no longer provide any services to libraries in Aitkin, Chisago, Isanti, Kanabec, Mille Lacs, and Pine counties. (This includes: training, scholarships, mini-grants, advocacy, VR kits, etc.)

Services to be offered by the proposed new multitype system are also not set yet. It would be based at the public library in Cambridge. At least some of the services now provided by CMLE would likely be duplicated to be available to those members.

State approval, and funding levels, are not set yet.

The ECRL board has voted to approve a resolution to move forward with this plan, and the Great River board is considering it now. We are attaching the proposed resolution below.

The CMLE board is going to vote on the proposed resolution at a meeting on Wed Feb. 12.

We are reaching out for some member comments, to share with the Board as they make a decision. So we are asking you to think about the services a multitype can provide to your library, and give us some thoughts.

You can go to this survey, and take about five minutes to provide thoughts. (Or, click here!)

Or, just email us at admin@cmle.org and tell us about your experiences with CMLE, share some ideas, and thoughts on this possible plan.

Thank you for your answers!!

Your ideas are important as decisions are made about your service.