Blog post by Stephen Wyber
An important part of the work of Knowledge Rights 21 is to build the confidence and ability of research, education, and cultural institutions – and above all libraries – to make the most of the possibilities open to them to provide access to knowledge in a digital age.
Doing this requires a combination of practical opportunities – through law and funding – and the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to seize them. In turn, these last aspects, to a large extent, are about education and training.
This educational work is essential. KR21 research to date has underlined how important it is to accompany legislative change with investment in information and learning – not just among libraries, but also among researchers, institutional leadership, and others.
A False Answer?
However, a particularly insidious tactic used by opponents of copyright reform is to argue that complaints or concerns about copyright regimes can all be answered by more education.
There are four major issues with this attitude.
The first, of course, is the potentially insulting message it sends. Even copyright scholars will often admit that the answer to a lot of questions is still ‘it depends’. A field that can sustain a community of academic researchers is not one that is necessarily simple. It is not fair to throw the blame for dysfunction in copyright regimes on the users, saying that only if they were better educated, everything would be OK.
The second is that it assumes that complexity is inevitable in copyright, rather than asking whether this is normal or desirable. There is an argument that if a law does not quickly make sense to a professional, such as a teacher or librarian, maybe the law is wrong. Moreover, when a public interest institution like a university needs to allocate a significant sum of money to managing copyright, it must be recognised that complexity is not cost-free.
The third is that education can serve as a distraction from efforts to advance reforms. As highlighted at the beginning, education should be a complement to, not a replacement for, moves to expand the possibilities open to libraries and their users. Education will not solve the lack of flexibility libraries have in negotiations with rightholders, nor the failure of laws to establish clear rights in a digital age.
The final is that the training offered can come from a perspective that focuses as much on maximising licensing payments as it does on enabling libraries to carry out their missions (if not more so). Training that simply points straight to where you can buy a licence, or encourages libraries to act as the copyright police, does not necessarily serve the interests of library users or wider public policy. As IFLA underlined in its 2018 statement on the topic, the focus should be on maximising what libraries and library users can do, not what they can’t.
A Checklist for Change
None of this, of course, is to detract from the value of learning. Insofar as education efforts provide the tools to allow librarians and those they support to make more effective use of copyrighted material, it is undoubtedly a positive.
However, when an education programme is being proposed, it is worth using the set of issues in this blog as a checklist. Is it blaming librarians for copyright dysfunction? Is it making assumptions about how complex copyright should be to navigate? Is it a distraction from needed reforms? Is it focused on how to enable libraries to fulfil their mission?
If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, learner beware!
16 September 2025
