Both copyright law and patent law are intended to serve two purposes:
(1) To ensure that writers and inventors receive a reward for their
efforts in creating literary works or inventions.
(2) To ensure that others benefit from the literary works or inventions
becoming publicly available.
If the purpose was only to reward writers and inventors, then both
cupyright and patents would have unlimited lives -- but they don't,
because there is a balance between the rights of the owners of the
intellectual property and the rights of others.
Unfortunately, electronic publications haven't been around long enough to
enable us to preserve this balance. But already we can see that there
are problems with people publishing material for a limited time, and then
withdrawing or revising their publication.
In the print world, it's a bit like us not having a copy of the First
Quarto of Hamlet, because it had been withdrawn in favour of the Second
Quarto, and no copies remained. Or like us not having the first versions
of Bruckner's symphonies, because he had revised them in favour or
revised versions.
It could be more serious that that. If you have read George Orwell's
_Nineteen_Eighty_Four_, you will remember that Winston Smith's job was to
revise history. If in this electronic world, there is only one copy of
historical source documents, still under the control of the creators,
then as political fashions change, they can be revised -- just as the
Chinese Government has edited historical pictures, to remove Lin Biao
from the side of Mao Zedong.
So libraries ought to take steps to preserve the historical, literary and
cultural record, even after the creators have revised it or lost interest
in it. It doesn't need to be done in every academic library around the
world, but at the very least there should be some kind of coordinated
effort to preserve everything of potential significance in at least three
places around the world, apart from the original site.
Giles
#### ## Giles Martin
####### #### Quality Control Section
################# University of Newcastle Libraries
#################### New South Wales, Australia
###################* E-mail: [log in to unmask]
##### ## ### Phone: +61 49 215 828 (International)
Fax: +61 49 215 833 (International)
##
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together
-- All's Well That Ends Well, IV.iii.98-99
On Mon, 15 Apr 1996, Thomas Krichel wrote:
> I think we will have to get accustomed to the fact that things on
> the internet are only available as long as the holder of write access
> to the disk will allow. The uncertainties over copyright adds to the
> instablity of the environment.
>
> In Economics, we see the birth of the postprint. A quite famous
> professor has made available over 20 PDF papers, most of them from
> the top journals (in versions immediately before the formal
> publication), on his homepage. If the publishers find out,
> he may be in for some trouble. And it would be worse if there were
> a bunch of libraries that copied the PDF in the meantime :-)
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