Les is of course correct that publishers tend to be relaxed about these things, but it remains best to play safe. I have a long list of examples where publishers proved to be recalcitrant after an author mistakenly assigned copyright to them - though not, I must say, any dating from the last few years....
Charles
Professor Charles Oppenheim
Head
Department of Information Science
Loughborough University
Loughborough
Leics LE11 3TU
Tel 01509-223065
Fax 01509 223053
e mail [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Leslie Carr [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 15 February 2009 20:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
On 15 Feb 2009, at 19:56, Charles Oppenheim wrote:
> I agree that the publisher cannot demand destruction of copies made
> PRIOR to the assignment, but can rightly object to any subsequent
> copying by anyone, including the original author.
Charles' contributions to this discussion are stark, but make it clear what the bottom line is in copyright law. If you have copyright, you have the automatic right to make copies. If you don't have copyright, you don't have the automatic right to make copies.
From other contributors, we know that a literal and unyielding interpretation of this law would make digital and online activities impossible. We also know that publishing companies do not demand such draconian restrictions on authors' activities.
The web has changed many things about the dissemination of
information: the expectation of copying as a fundamental part of the transmission mechanism, the expectation of indexing and searching as a fundamental part of information provision, the expectation of open access to public funded information, the emergence of the knowledge commons. The law has not yet caught up with these changes in society.
It hasn't even caught up with the personal computer revolution, let alone the Internet, the Web, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web or the cloud.
That's an awfully big backlog of technology and emerging social practice to accommodate in our legislation, and frankly there just aren't enough legal minds on the job at the moment.
Most legal positions in the online and digital arenas are compromises, fudges and emerging social agreements between parties. So it is inevitable that repository staff are going to encounter problems when faced with institutional managers who want definitive answers, cast- iron guarantees and legal certainties. What we can provide instead is the reassurance of a decade and a half of repository practice and case history, emerging (and emerged) institutional policy, custom and procedure. We (the repository community, JISC, funding councils and
institutions) should continue to work together to agree reasonable practices that enable our own industry (the research industry) to flourish, develop and compete internationally while allowing its service industry (the primary and secondary publishing companies) the space to build appropriate businesses that will facilitate that aim.
--
Les Carr
Lecturer, Researcher, Repository Manager, Repository Developer, Open Access Advocate Co-Director of the EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science, set up to examine the impact of the Web on society and vice versa.
But not a lawyer.
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