Foreword

• Publication year: 2009

Andrew Chin ⁰

I am honored to have the opportunity to introduce the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology's symposium issue honoring the distinguished and multifaceted career of Professor Laura N. ("Lolly") Gasaway. In doing so, I note that Lolly's career is a work very much in progress, so this festschrift is not a retrospective, but an appreciation.

For the past nine years, I have benefited from Lolly's exemplary, often heroic, service as a mentor, faculty colleague and associate dean and as a fellow scholar and teacher in intellectual property. We have worked together frequently and closely. But I have only had the privilege of sharing her recent history, and I am pleased to note the inclusion in this symposium of many of Lolly's friends and colleagues who can speak more fully to Lolly's nearly four decades as a law librarian and law professor, and to her myriad roles on the national stage in the broader legal, library and academic communities.

Our task is all the easier, because the record speaks for itself. At every turn, Lolly has brought her distinctive voice—and I'm not just alluding to her unmistakable, no-nonsense Southern drawl—to the public discourse on copyright law, as a tenacious advocate of the values of librarianship who also fully understands and appreciates the value orientations of authors, publishers, scholars, teachers, students, universities and other stakeholders.¹ Her contributions have been prolific and enduring precisely because her voice has been so welcome. It is a voice of reason, of compassion, of wisdom, and of clarity.

Lolly has brought that clarity to her famous chart on "When Works Pass Into the Public Domain,"² which untangles the intricate interplay among various copyright term provisions in the 1909 and 1976 Copyright Acts, the Berne Convention Implementation Act, and the Copyright Term Extension Act. When you search on Google for "public domain," you get two Wikipedia pages, and the next link that comes up is to Lolly's chart. This unassuming Web page with a clunky URL has a Google PageRank of 8.³ For comparison, the New York Public Library's home page⁴ also happens to have a Google PageRank of 8.⁵

Just as Lolly's stewardship of that Web page has illuminated the contours of the copyright public domain for many thousands of anonymous visitors, Lolly's painstaking work within the interstices of the copyright statute has clarified the opportunities and constraints facing libraries as they serve the public...