This sounds so familiar. Was this a quote form a
Napster brief, or was it Kodak?
"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."
> On Tue, 18 Oct 2005, Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote:
>
> > > http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/self-faq/
> >
> > I will point out the incorrect information in your
> FAQ.
> >
> > It is simply wrong to state that the copyright
> transfer agreement
> > does not apply to preprint when the agreement is
> not made at the
> > time of preprint. You made a wrong assumption
> that the copyright
> > that is transferred according to the agreement is
> different from
> > the copyright that exists in preprint. When you
> transfer copyright
> > in your work to someone else, the copyright covers
> all the copies
> > of the work. That includes preprint. Note that
> the author can
> > retain a copy at his website. He simply no longer
> has the right
> > to create more copies and to distribute more
> copies unless he
> > has the permission from the copyright holder that
> holds copyright
> > in his work.
>
> 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. 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.
>
> That's all that's needed for OA; that's all that's
> claimed.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> > Another wrong information that you continue to
> give is related
> > to corrigenda. Corrigenda alone is not illegal
> from the perspective
> > of copyright law. However, it is simply illegal
> to combine preprint
> > and corrigenda to create a text that is totally
> identical to postprint
> > whose copyright is owned by copyright holder
> unless you are
> > permitted to do so. The reason is simply that the
> copyright holder
> > holds copyright in postprint (and preprint). You
> continue to
> > give the wrong information that it is legal to
> combine preprint
> > and corrigenda.
>
> 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.
>
> Stevan Harnad
>
>
>
#############################################################
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:56 GMT