Subject:  Tables of contents (TOC) and copyright--summary of replies

This is being posted to Autocat and Serialst, since a number of people on
these lists asked for summaries.  I will try to keep it as short as
possible, as requested.

I found the discussion from last summer in Serialst that briefly touched
on this topic.  The person who asked the question told me that she had not
been able to find any definitive answer.  Unfortunately, this still seems
to be the case.  I got a number of conflicting replies to my question,
although the people who felt scanning tables of contents and putting them
on our homepage would be okay outnumbered those who felt it was a
copyright problem.

The reasons for believing this activity would be legal varied,
interestingly enough.  Several people were certain they had heard or seen
a specific pronouncment from the Copyright Office that TOCs were not
covered by copyright, but no one knew an exact citation or person's name.

Other people felt using the TOC in this manner would be covered under the
fair use provisions.  Several people cited the 10% of the publication
guideline.

Several other people felt the TOC would not be copyrightable because it
did not show any originality, invention, or clear authorship and was
basically just a mechanical compilation of article titles and authors'
names.  One person suggested that perhaps typographical or layout
copyright issues might be involved.  I'm not sure I quite follow this.
It may be characteristic of medical journals, but most of their TOCs are
just boring, everyday lists, possibly with a font change or two, or maybe
several small pictures.  Journals in other fields might be different.

One person, who works for a company that compiles an index, said
publishers actually send them TOCs and ask to have them included in the
index.  Apparently they view it as a marketing tool.

The few people who spoke out against scanning and mounting TOCs cited
following fair use guidelines and possible problems with publishers who
had their own web pages with TOCs or commercial services.  (I can't
imagine we would put up enough TOCs to threaten any commercial
enterprise!)

I was referred to a number of helpful sources on the Internet:

cni-copyright listserv (If you want subscription info, please sent me an
e-mail.)
http://www.netrights.com/IPsites
http://www.crl.com/~philip/law/law.html
http://www.law.indiana.edu/law/v-lib/lawindex.html
http://www.njlawnet.com/ipindex/iplist.html
http://fairuse.stanford.edu

Many of these sites cited eachother and the same places, so it can get a
little incestuous. One of the nicest things I found (through one of the
above somehow!) was a site which gave fairly simple, no frills
explanations of web issues and the fair use test at
http://www.benedict.com/.  There is also a long, six-part copyright law
FAQ which you can get through most of the pages listed above or from the
archives of cni-copyright.

Several people reminded me that the questions should be the same, whether
you're doing an old-fashioned paper in someone's mailbox or high tech
scanned TOC.  Others felt electronic access added other issues which had
not yet been addressed by government regulations or court cases.

Hopefully, this hasn't been too long.  If you have any questions, please
e-mail me.

Susan Harman
techserv@access.digex.net