ABSTRACT
On October 19th, 1976, the first major revision of the Copyright statute since 1909 was signed into law, after what Patterson and Lindberg term a “twenty-one year gestation period.” 47 Considering the number of Congressional hearings and studies that took place during those two decades, the volume of literature peripheral to the impending Copyright Law and the fierceness of the arguments, it is curious that there is so little related to course reserves in the record. One Senate Judiciary Committee Report (S.94–473) makes at least tangential reference to the service when it states “for example, if a college professor instructs his class to read an article from a copyrighted journal, the school library would not be permitted, under subsection (g), to reproduce copies of the article for the members of the class.” 48 Barbara Ringer, Assistant Register of Copyrights, expressed a similar opinion at a symposium sponsored by the alumni and faculty of Rutgers University’s Library Graduate School in 1972, “When you have a book on the reserve shelf in a college library and you have fifty students coming in and each one ordering a copy of the same three chapters, this is not single copying.” 49
