Thanks in large part to the lobbying efforts of NEA and other education and library groups, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 will not contain faculty-unfriendly legal protections for databases.

The copyright protection for digital information collections originally proposed would have created a giant roadblock for hundreds of thousands of researchers and academics who use databases in teaching and research...

The academic community also won language in the Act that allows the Library of Congress to waive some copyrighted protection in order to protect fair use. Fair use is the right to make limited free use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes...

In the November elections, labor unions registered more than 500,000 union members and, on Election Day alone, made hundreds of thousands of phone calls.

The results: In a year when turnout was weak, 24 percent of voters came from union households, one reason why pro-public education forces, according to an NEA legislative analysis, gained two seats in the Senate and 14 in the House.

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