I am very excited to have had the opportunity to have a private recital of a lecture that Kenneth Crews gave at the Kraemer Copyright Conference, an annual event for librarians and archivists, held at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs in June 2025. I felt like it really fit with our special library issue, as Kenny has been at the forefront of library and university issues for his entire career, from serving on the CONFU committee, to all of his work with WIPO related to libraries and exceptions, to his work with universities and clients of all kinds, not to mention his scholarship and lectures around the world. His lecture that we are reproducing here in Colorado Springs provides an overview of copyright history as it relates to libraries and archives, and the scholars and students that use those libraries and archives. And so, we spent two evenings on Zoom, recording his lecture. (I think the original lecture was 45 minutes, but I couldn’t help but ask a bunch of questions, and so we were more like 2-3 hours.) This is the transcript of that lecture and my questions and our conversation too.
-Elizabeth Townsend Gard, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the Copyright Society