Doing extensive business with the Copyright Clearance Center, including purchase of their blanket campus license, is not, in my opinion, a way to buy reassurance and security; instead, it increases the risk that our space for fair use will shrink over time.
from Kevin Smith, Here we go again: latest GSO ruling an odd victory for libraries - Scholarly Communications @ Duke
Kevin is absolutely right (of course!). If there is a clear takeaway from yesterday's GSU opinion, it is that the more you license, the more you will be forced to license. The data in the opinion reveals that licensing revenue on academic uses of excerpts is often infinitessimally small compared to revenue from the sale of books (which is often made up almost entirely of sales to libraries); no one is going out of business for lack of permissions revenue. To the extent that we can preserve fair use rights by avoiding unnecessary licenses, we will do a great service to our faculty, our students, and our budgets.