ABSTRACT
The structure of the traditional copyright legal regime is based on the fixity and tangibility of a limited number of documents that can be monitored and controlled through known distribution systems. In 1935, the National Association of Book Publishers, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Science Research Council forged an informal agreement that allowed academic research libraries. It provides photographic copies of books or periodicals provided that the researcher was given notice that he or she was not exempt from liability for any copyright infringement. Late twentieth-century technological advances, particularly the continued falling costs of photocopying, the expansion of telecommunications networks, the digitization of documents, and the rise of the World Wide Web, have caused both an exacerbation of the economic problems in the publishing marketplace related to widespread photocopying and the potential for new streams of income for scholarly works, particularly in the areas of distance learning and digital rights management.
