On 10/18/05, Stevan Harnad <harnad[_at_]ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> There is just one fundamental oversight on your part here, and the
> rest of the disagreement derives from that one oversight: The online
> medium is *different*. "Copy* as in "copyright" no longer has its
> prior straightforward meaning, and cannot.
Once again, this is where you are very mistaken. The copyright law is very adaptive to all technologies. A copy in online medium is no different from any other medium. What is different is the implied license that comes with each medium. If I buy a DVD movie, the implied license that comes with it is that I am able to watch it on my PC. It is necessary for my PC to copy from DVD to buffer in order to give smooth display. Technically speaking, that is copy. But, it is permissible in order for me to see the copyrighted work (that is, movie).
> If you leave the preprint
> on the website, everything else comes with the territory: accessing it,
> reading it on-screen, downloading it, storing it, doing computations on
> it, printing it off (own local use, not distribution), linking to it,
> citing it.
Of these 8 actions that you listed, only three actions are questionable and it all depends on situation that these three actions occur. These three actions are downloading, storing and printing. (The rest is covered by implied license.) If these actions do not fall within the boundary of fair use (in the U.S.), these actions are considered as copyright infringement.
You seem to imply that once a preprint is available on website, it is a license for everyone to commit copyright infringement. That is not how copyright works.
> The preprint and the preprint self-archiving pre-date the submission, the
> revision, the acceptance and any subsequent copyright transfer. Regardless
> of whether the preprint is regarded as covered by the later copyright,
> or the postprint is regarded as a derivative work, the cat's out of the
> bag, irretrievably. The preprint, perfectly legally, is already online
> and accessible to all, and continues to be, because, in fact, there's
> no real way to remove something from the web once it has been made
> publicly accessible and has propagated forever to mirrors and caches
> and harvests and distributed downloads and wayback machines. That too
> comes with the territory.
That does not give everyone the license to disregard copyright law.
> And that's the concrete, practical part. The rest is just formalistic
> pedantry (based mostly on moot paper-based notions), with no practical
> import online -- or on legalistic superstition, with likewise no
> practical import online.
If you have no regard for the correct meaning of the copyright law, why do you continue to claim that it is legal to do this or that? Why do you continue to give misinformation about copyright if you have no regard for the formal or legal meaning of copyright law?
> With all due respect, I think that that is exactly the sort of formalism
> that has no concrete practical content whatever. If I write a text,
> post it publicly on the web, submit it for publication, revise it in
> accordance with the recommendations of the referees and then the text
> is accepted for publication and copyright is transfered to the publisher
> (a) there is no way to get the preprint off the web and (b) it is utter
> nonsense to say that I cannot post and link a list of corrigenda to the
> preprint. Of course I can.
Of course, you can link to the corrigenda. But, what you can't do is to encourage people to infringe copyright holder's copyright by telling them to combine preprint with corrigenda to create an identical copy of postprint.
Again, it is your business to keep misinformation about copyright in your FAQ. I can only hope that people who read your FAQ will not take your words as final.
Finally, you should start thinking about termination of transfer of copyright as provided by Sections 203 and 304 in the U.S. copyright law. These will enable some U.S. authors to terminate transfer of copyright on their articles 35 years after publication (there are more rules as explained in the sections) and thereby, they can make their articles available on website for the public to access. This is one example of how you can do legal ways to accomplish your goals for open access.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<josephpietrojeungriolo[_at_]gmail.com>
<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: 4,822
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Thu Oct 20 2005 - 02:05:00 GMT
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