Tracey Armstrong’s Foreword

Tracey Armstrong

Lolly Gasaway is a force of copyright nature.  Like other forces of nature – which ensure that, after all is said and done and all the storms have passed through, balance returns to the world so that all of us can go about our daily lives – Lolly lives and breathes the balance that is copyright.  Rightsholders have rights and users have obligations to support those, and on the other side users contribute to the Constitutional goal of the “progress of science” and rightsholders have obligations to support that, and Lolly has occupied all of the roles on all sides and understands them well.

Lolly has served as a professor, and a dean, and a head librarian, and probably sometimes a lawyer, for many years at the University of North Carolina School of Law, and before that at other academic institutions.  She has also written and published books and articles on copyright (and other) issues, and advised others who have done so.  She also took up the role of co-chair of the Copyright Office’s Section 108 Working Group during 2006-08 and helped manage a complicated series of hearings and conversations among rightsholders, librarians and other users to try to update that important provision of the U.S. Copyright Act.  Through all of this, Lolly has always been – and has been well known to be – even-handed, level-headed and wonderfully good-humored as she has cajoled and convinced others to carry through on the important principles of copyright law:  to promote the growth and sharing of knowledge, while providing due respect and compensation to rightsholders and encouraging the thoughtful and careful exercise of fair use and other user privileges.

Lolly and I have known each other for a long time.  In my earlier years at Copyright Clearance Center, I had personal responsibility for managing our transactional and other services directed at the academic market.  In that role, I made a point of visiting academic customers and prospective customers on behalf of the licensing services that CCC provides, and promoting those services as filling a core need for academia.  As we designed new products and services, improved old ones, and tried to find other ways in which to help our customers, Lolly never failed to be there when needed – to make introductions, to bridge gaps, to think about solutions, to be a ready partner.  She made me a better manager and she made CCC a better service provider.  It thus became my privilege and my delight to invite Lolly to join the Board of Directors of CCC when the opportunity presented itself, and it is to my great satisfaction that she accepted the role and continues to serve today.

With her retirement from the University of North Carolina, Lolly is now turning her skills, knowledge and wisdom in the copyright field to the benefit of a new audience.  With this new book, published in electronic form (Lolly has never hesitated to keep up with technology), Lolly brings a concise summary of copyright law in the United States to those in the publishing industry who, though not lawyers, need to be familiar with it as part of their everyday activities.  Text-based materials are still the starting point for copyright (going back to Gutenberg and the Statute of Anne), and those who produce text for the American market need to be comfortable in understanding the concepts, and many of the details, of the law without necessarily immersing themselves in case law and theoretical analysis.  I expect that this work will be useful to publishing staff and find great acceptance as a tool for daily use.

And I also expect that Lolly will continue to go from strength to strength, sharing her knowledge, her wit and her wonderful personality with her new audiences as she has long done with those of us who know her.

Tracey Armstrong
President and CEO
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
April 2014

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