In our April 1995 Newsletter, we reported on the case American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc. where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that photocopying of articles from scientific journals by Texaco employees was not a fair use of the works and thus, copyright infringement was found. The Second Circuit now has issued a clarification of this decision stating that the decision did not "extend to the copying of journal articles by an individual researcher outside an institutional framework." The Second Circuit considered that the fair use analysis may differ based on whether a person is employed by an institution such as Texaco and is engaged in research on behalf of the institution or whether the person is engaged in independent research.

In the dissenting opinion, it was stated that "The selection by an individual scientist of the articles useful to that scientist's own inquiries is not systematic copying, and does not become systematic because some number of other scientists in the same institution--whether four hundred or four--are doing the same thing."