I recently interviewed for a librarian position at an institution (a for-profit biomedical) that was clearly violating fair use (rules are different for educational and for-profits). They were getting electronic copies and passing them around the company. The so-called Texaco case made clear that this could not be legally done. That is one reason there is an organization called the Copyright Compliance Center (CCC). Even libraries that do free interlibrary loans have limits on how many articles they can "borrow" from a given journal in a given year. If they go beyond this, they are expected to either subscribe to the journal or pay a fee to the CCC.
The practice of individuals providing each other this kind of copying service is fairly new historically (since scanning became so easy). Of course, for years many scientific and a few other journals have provided authors a set number of copies of their article (reprints) which others can request and the author is expected to pay the postage to send the requestor the article. There are even standardized post cards which one can use to request these. These are sometimes the same journals that have charged the authors page costs rather than paying the author for use of the article. Quite a little racket, actually. With the Internet, the whole set of common practices of academic publishing, have come into question (partly because institutions through their libraries often cannot afford to buy--again--information created on institutional time by their own employees!). Of course, certain publishers (one in the Netherlands in particular) make huge profits for their shareholders through their monopolistic practices.
I'll stop before I get on a real rant! <g>
Harvey Brenneise
West Seattle
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