Jan Carmikle has her hands full.

She is one of only two staff members in the 10-campus University of California system dedicated full-time to copyrights, copyright infringement and related trademark issues.

In that regard, she can be both the UC Davis campus's best friend — and that frustrating person who tells us we are misusing really great technology toys.

These days, when videos, music and essays are abundantly available and everywhere on the Internet, using somebody else's materials is a convenient shortcut to supplementing our own projects.

Unfortunately, this apparent time-saver has its legal downside. When we borrow other people's work without their permission, use it in or as our work and then place it on the Internet, the copyright violations can be easily discovered — and just as easily turned into a lawsuit.

Carmikle, who has a law degree, is not an attorney with the UC Office of the General Counsel; rather her job is in Technology Transfer Services, a unit in UC Davis' Office of Research, where she serves as an adviser and educator as much as an intellectual property licensing officer, her official title. She is also the campus's "designated agent" for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on files-sharing issues.

A UC Davis alumna who earned her bachelor's degree in animal behavior in 1987 and a law degree in 1990 — Carmikle has a long history on campus.

She started in business contracts in 1995, working "with virtually every unit on campus, at the med center and the organized research units." Because of her legal education, Carmikle took on copyright and trademark work, as well as some patent work until the Technology Transfer Office was created in 1999. When a full-time position for those areas was created in 2004, she was a natural to handle those issues full-time.

Carmikle's job is to smooth the process so that the campus can get on with its business.

What are intellectual property rights?

Intellectual property rights attach to intangible property, as opposed to real or personal property. There are four types: patent (protects ideas), copyright (protects the creative expression of ideas,) trade/service marks (protects unique identifiers of the source of goods or services, often related to a patent or copyright) and trade secrets, which we don't have at UC, being a public institution.

Who should care about this at UC Davis and why?

Copyrights have always been important at teaching and research universities, where the campus community creates and uses it in enormous quantities. But the exponential growth of the Internet, partly due to technology's development of tools such that even little kids can put things out there with no oversight, has made copyright a "big deal" again.

Copyright isn't logical or particularly fair. Owners can be irrational about protecting or sharing their property at whatever cost they wish to charge, so one can't just use one's common sense. Copyright is a "strict liability tort" — it doesn't matter if you knew you were infringing a copyright (or even knew that you were making a copy) or if you thought it was OK when it wasn't.

What is the biggest issue you deal with when it comes to intellectual property rights?

My headache areas are "fair use;" music; open source/access text/software/biology; and illegal file-sharing. I often don't hear from people until after they've unknowingly created a problem which needs to be fixed.

What do you predict will be the most problematic in the future?

I don't see copyright returning to a low-key legal specialty any time soon. Changing copyright law to be more user-friendly will take a very long time (it hasn't really changed since 1976), while technology changes copyright by the day. And, since it's become so easy to use technology to make and distribute copies, and copyright owners increasingly care, individuals almost need to be copyright law experts. Job security for me!

Is it true that the faculty has to follow intellectual property right laws when giving lectures? What about when writing papers?

Everyone has to follow federal copyright law. Copyright law says one must have a license to exercise copyrights to someone else's "original work of authorship" unless there is an exception spelled out in law.

The copyrights are the rights to reproduce, distribute, make "derivative works" from original works, perform publicly or display publicly. The statutory exceptions include some special ones for libraries, fair use, and the TEACH (Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization) Act (which isn't as good for us as it sounds).

What's your best advice for faculty and staff who want to learn more about how to handle copyright law?

Assuming law school is out of the question, there are some excellent resources on campus and through the Internet. There's also a lot of misinformation out there though, too, and since copyright is a "strict liability tort" (see above) getting accurate information is critical.

UC Davis has a copyright Web site at www.innovationaccess.ucdavis.edu/home.cfm?id=OVC,23,1729,1730,1783 on the InnovationAccess Web site, and I'm here for complex situations. I give Staff Development classes, run a couple of listservs on both copyrights and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, have a "Copyrights at UC Davis" Smartsite project, am always reachable via e-mail at jdcarmikle@ucdavis.edu, and will do a short or long talk for any group I can convince to sit still for a while.