Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Stevan Harnad <harnad[_at_]ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> It is not just a little important but extremely important that those
> who are involved in the legalities of copyright and copyright law in
> the digital era should come to clearly understand that refereed-journal
> article authors do not seek the kind of copyright protection that most
> authors seek. One of the biggest sources of misunderstanding and confusion
> about copyright among academics today revolves around this very point.
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#1.3
>
> I posted this to the copyright list precisely to highlight this point.

It is good that you provide an explanation for submitting your post to CNI-COPYRIGHT. But, the problem you described is not unknown to people on CNI-COPYRIGHT.

When you submit your post to CNI-COPYRIGHT, it is inevitable that someone will respond to your post from the perspective of copyright such as my post on the definition of publication. That is how a discussion group works.

> (I am obviously not referring here to the commentator to whom I am
> presently responding, who has -- I think incorrectly -- concluded that
> putting one's work in the public domain is the only way to protect against
> this very conflation. Putting one's work in the public domain cedes far
> too much control -- over both the authorship and integrity of the text --
> and it makes it impossible for refereed-research authors even to license
> their publishers to try to recover their investment by trying to sell
> the text. Hence public domain is not the solution for these authors.)

Public domain has nothing to do with this thread of discussion. There is no need to bring it up here.

> Call it whatever you like: It is what you are violating when you
> plagiarize. (And I'm not sure the authors of public-domain works are
> protected from it.)
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#5

Show me a law (in the U.S.) that forbids plagiarism. (To save your time searching for law, there is none.)

There are two kinds of plagiarism.

One kind of plagiarism is to copy ideas from sources without giving attribution. The ability to copy and express ideas without any restriction is a cornerstone of the freedom of speech in the First Amendement. It is no wonder that there is no law forbidding copying ideas without attribution.

Other kind of plagiarism is to copy expressions from sources without giving attribution. There are two different cases in this kind.

One case is that the copied expressions fall under Fair Use. If they fall under Fair Use, it is not required to provide attribution. This is like saying that plagiarism is legal and permissible, in the same way as saying that infringement is legal.

Other case is that the copied expressions do not fall under Fair Use. In this case, this action is called "copyright infringement", not "plagiarism". It does not matter if there is any attribution or not.

The academic world, on the other hand, has its own rules regarding plagiarism. These rules are inconsequential for outsiders.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 5,961

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Thu Sep 05 2002 - 23:18:54 GMT