The Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act (UCITA) -- Its Effects and Interrelationships with Copyright Law


	The current U. S. copyright laws grant the copyright holder the exclusive rights over: reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display. A limited, but nevertheless important in the library context, exception to the exclusivity of these rights is the "first-sale doctrine;" under the first-sale doctrine, a person who legitimately owns a copy of the original work, i.e., one who has purchased the work from or otherwise acquired ownership of the work with the permission of the copyright holder, has the full authority to "sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy" so acquired without additional permission from the copyright holder.[ section 109(a)]. (This is one of the main legal premises that allows a library to loan the materials it acquires for its collection and thus function as it does today.) Thus, if a particular transfer of intellectual property is deemed to be a sale, then the owner of the copyright will have lost all control over that particular copy of the work. This is in complete contrast to the situation in which the copyright owner licenses a work, meaning that the owner of the copyright entered into a contractual agreement with another party regarding the use of the work, but not its ownership. Under a licensing agreement, the work has not been sold, but instead permission to use the work, within whatever specified conditions or guidelines may be set forth or defined in the license, has been established. And in this situation, the copyright holder has not given up any of his rights in the future use of the copy of the work involved, except to the extent he may have chosen to do so in the license agreement itself.