I’m Bobby Glushko, the Scholarly Communications and Copyright Librarian for the University of Toronto Libraries (super long title activate!), and yes, this is real, and yes, it is a problem. While it’s not a settled question of law whether contract provisions trump statutory rights such as fair dealing, as a matter of practice we often don’t have the time or the money to engage in litigation on these issues.
That said, practices like this certainly make it more difficult to justify paying the prices that publishers like HBR request, and it certainly makes faculty much less likely to assign HBR cases and articles to their students. It may, in essence, be a problematic practice that corrects itself…
