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----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I spoke to Patricia Brennan of ARL (Association of Research Libraries) last Thursday, Oct. 31. She told me that in the prior week the ARL membership had voted to NOT endorse ANY of the CONFU guidelines. Their rationale: why give up rights you already have. ARL has started drafting guidelines for their member organizations. This should not be surprising. This is the same pattern that occurred in 1975-77. With the passage of the 1976 Copyright Law the Classroom Guidelines were drawn up and endorsed by organizations. However, American Library Association and other university libraries did not sign on, and began drafting their own guidelines. I for one think the Image guidelines are extremely problemmatic and conceptually inconsistent. If a digital thumbnail has no commercial value, why must I then ask permission from publishers to use it, especially since the publishers do not own the rights to the image? They will refer the question to authors, who do not generally own the rights. The time and expense involved in writing to publishers for permission to use something that has no commercial value to which they don't own the rights, generally speaking, is daunting. I am heartened to learn that ARL will not sign on, and that they reached this decision before the final guidelines were released. I am very concerned that these guidelines, if adopted by many organizations, could seriously erode the best parts of education as we know it, and could lead us into an era of education for those schools that can pay for information, especially information that is kept in trust for all of humanity, to be treasured and preserved and passed on for the enlightenment of future generations, and not just those individuals and institutions that can pay. Maryly Snow UC Berkeley [log in to unmask]