Re: copyright management information?

On 03/25/99, Mark Lemley <mlemley[_at_]mail.law.utexas.edu> wrote:
>
> I just had an article published by the Duke Law Journal (with Eugene
> Volokh). Despite the fact that we retained copyright, the editors
> apparently stripped out our copyright notice, and put their own
> copyright notice on the cover.
>
> I have no intention of suing them, but it strikes me that this sort
> of situation may well violate new section 1202. The act was clearly
> deliberate, so it seems that liability would depend on whether the
> editors knew or should have known that doing this would "enable or
> facilitate" infringement. I don't expect they intended to infringe
> the copyright themselves, but I would also be willing to bet that
> they would grant reprint permission to our article without contacting
> us. Wouldn't this be "enabling infringement"?

Mark,

Could be that the Journal is declaring its ownership of the copyright to the *compilation* of articles, in which case each contributor still owns copyright to his/her own article. So if someone for some reason wanted to reproduce the *entire* Journal, they would have to obtain permission from Duke Law Journal as well as from an author of each article (provided it was a non-exclusive license). If someone wanted to reproduce your article, they would have to get permission from you, since you did not sign over the copyright to the Journal. Seems to me that it would have benefited Duke to keep your copyright notice on your paper so that Duke would not have to go to the trouble of re-directing requests for permission to reprint the article, to the copyright holder, you. Perhaps they stripped out your copyright notice to make all the articles appear uniform.

Marilyn Uffner Alan
Assistant Editor
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
340 Pine Street, Sixth Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104
415 392-2665, ext. 202 (voice)
415 982-2662 (fax)
malan[_at_]mkp.com
http://www.mkp.com/ Received on Fri Mar 26 1999 - 19:55:12 GMT