CHARLES OPPENHEIM

Biography: Charles Oppenheim has been Professor of Information Science at Loughborough University since 1998.   Prior to that, he has   held a variety of posts in academia and the electronic publishing industry, working for International Thomson, Pergamon and Reuters at various times.   

He has been involved in, and published widely on legal issues in information work since the mid 1970s.    He is author of "The Legal and Regulatory Environment for Electronic Information" (Infonortics, 2001). He is a well-known authority on copyright and has written about 100 articles on the topic.

He has been a member of JISC and/or some of its committees since 1992.   He is currently a member of the JISC Scholarly Publishing Working Group and of the HEFCE/UUK Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights.   He has worked on, or managed, a number of JISC Projects, including some on Open Access, eprints, pricing issues and copyright issues.

Charles is an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.    He is a member of the Legal Advisory Board of the European Commission. He was the Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords' Inquiry into the Information Superhighway. He is a regular contributor to conferences and to the professional and scholarly literature, and is on the editorial board of a number of professional and learned journals, and of Annual Review of Information Science and Technology.

Title: E-copyright - what you need to know

Summary: Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “digital copyright” or “e-copyright”, as copyright law takes little account of the medium on which material is recorded. However, in practice, the digital media have raised many fears amongst copyright owners and many opportunities for copyright users that are not relevant to print media.    This talk will review what the fears and opportunities are and how copyright owners have responded to the challenges posed by the digital environment.   There will be discussion of recent changes in the law and how these will impact librarians.   Issues to do with the reduction in scope for fair dealing and library privilege, legal protection for technical protection systems and for rights management information, and the new restricted act of communicating information will be explained, together with the implications of the recent William Hill case and the problems of using electronic signatures for document supply requests.    The talk is bound to wipe the smile off some delegates' faces, so the talk will conclude with an assessment of how to evaluate the risks incurred by current practices.