the flexibility that fair use offers versus the certainty offered by more specific exceptions for research and teaching found in the copyright laws of most other countries

Copyfraud is everywhere. False copyright notices appear on modern reprints of Shakespeare's plays, Beethoven's piano scores, greeting card versions of Monet's Water Lilies, and even the U.S. Constitution. Archives claim blanket copyright in everything in their collections. Vendors of microfilmed versions of historical newspapers assert copyright ownership. These false copyright claims, which are often accompanied by threatened litigation for reproducing a work without the owner's permission, result in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use.

good intro to copyright

Timothy K. Armstrong, An Introduction to Publication Agreements for Authors, a hand-out for a workshop, May 13, 2009. Armstrong is a copyright specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Comment. This is a very good primer for authors who don't understand copyright or why they should try to retain rights. It focuses on legal scholars writing for law reviews, but Armstrong has put it under a CC-BY-SA license and encourages others to adapt it for their own purposes.

Motion: that existing copyright laws do more harm than good