🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a number of questions regarding the copyright rules of ACM and IEEE,
and the federal copyright statutes.  I'm a professor at the University of
Utah, so I frequently want to distribute papers that have been published in
ACM or IEEE journals or conference proceedings so that they can be discussed
in an advanced course or seminar.  As I understand the federal copyright
laws, this is allowed for educational purposes as long as I follow certain
guidelines that limit the amount of text that is copied and restrict me from
charging for the copies.  What is not allowed, or at least the Univ of Utah
considers to be disallowed, is for me to put together a collection of papers
on a topic and charge the students for the cost of the copying.  Thus, the
most convenient ways to distribute the papers without "eating" the copying
expenses, leaving the packet at a copy center like Kinko's or copying them
within the department and asking the students to pay some nominal fee to
cover the of the copying, cannot be employed.  This leaves a number of less
satisfying alternatives:

   a. Put the papers on reserve somewhere (e.g., library) and let the
      students make their own copies.  I believe that there is a limit
      to the number of articles that could be put on reserve and copied
      at a time, although I may be mistaken here.

   b. Copy and distribute the papers, but don't charge for the copying costs.

   c. Break the law (not an acceptable solution, although probably common).

   d. Get special permission from the copyright holders (ACM and IEEE)
      to make copies for educational purposes (already allowed), but to
      collect a nominal copying fee (not allowed, as I understand the law).

Do I have a correct understanding of the situation?  Can I as an educator
provide copies of ACM or IEEE copyrighted material (papers) to my students
and collect a copying charge (or let Kinko's etc. do so for me)?  If this is
not normally allowed, which I believe is the case, is there any way to get
explicit permission to do so?  This falls into the category of uses that I
would expect the ACM and IEEE to support (distributing research papers so
that graduate students and faculty could discuss them), and quibbling over
the way that they are actually copied and paid for seems silly.

Thanks.

-- 
John Carter   -*-   Department of Computer Science    -*-   University of Utah

Email: retrac@cs.utah.edu	US mail: 3190 MEB, Salt Lake City, UT  84112