Brigham Young University Education & Law Journal; 2000 Issue 1, p165, 25p

     This document outlines many of the principle copyright cases that deal with the academic exception and explains how they relate to a professor’s rights to their own works.  However I used it predominantly for it’s description of the case Sherrill v Grieves which I could not locate on its own.

     The case, decided in 1929, is fairly simple.  Sherrill was a teacher in the US Army.  He created a course on military sketching and surveying.  He could not find a textbook for this course so using his lecture notes he created a text for it.  He allowed the military the rights to use a portion of the textbook in a pamphlet.  Grieves wrote a book about military sketching.  Sherrill accused him of copying his pamphlet and text.  Grieves said that he did not and even if he did copy the pamphlet it was a government publication and therefore not subject to copyright.  The courts eventually ruled in favor of Sherrill arguing that he was not obligated to publish his lecture notes, and that since it was not required for his job it would not fall under the equivalent of work for hire in the 1909 copyright act.  Also since the work in the pamphlet was his original material and not required to be given to the government the pamphlet was not a public domain government document.  Therefore Grieves was found guilty of copyright infringement.

    The importance fo this case for us is that it established the academic exception for the first time.  There are several mitigating factors however, in how this case could relate to Mauro v Allentown.  First is the age of this case, the case was decided many years prior to the 1976 Copyright Act and so it is not exactly understood how, if at all, it could be interpreted under the new laws.  Second is the fact that this deals with a military university and not a public high school, but it seems that most decisions about academic copyright happen at the university level.  Finally is the fact that the case also dealt with the government document issue in addition to general academics.  I’m not sure how this could impact the decision, but thought it should be mentioned.