Re: Politics and Authorship in Scientific Journals

On Mon, 14 Jun 1999, Joseph P. Riolo <riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> wrote:
>
> Many moons ago, we had a discussion on whether all of the people
> mentioned in the ridiculously long list of authors in some scientific
> articles are true authors as understood in the context of copyright.
> Eugen Tarnow's article said that it is not necessarily so. The
> article is located at:
>
> That some scientists have no care about compromising the true spirit of
> authorship is disgusting.

Not really. I think that in a lot of cases the publication is viewed as part of the research. There may be one guy who is the brains behind the whole operation - but may not have spent any time on the publication. Similarly, the guy who got the funding. From a copyright point of view, probably neither is entitled to authorship. But they will invariably be listed first on the paper reporting the research.

The problem is that publication is one of the primary ways in which scientific research is distributed and recognized. Scientists typically include as authors the people who contributed to the research, and not necessarily (and often not) the ones who contributed the original expression to the paper publishing the research. While original creative expression is everything to the copyright atty, it is almost irrelevant to the scientists publishing a paper.

However, this does get me to one question that I have had for awhile. Five or six years ago, we tried to make a case for Fraud on the Copyright Office when a registrant knowingly, or with gross negligence, made false statements in a registration with the Copyright Office. Contrary testimony by a former C/R office atty that registration is extremely permissive carried the day with the judge. My question is whether any one has ever been able to sucessfully advance this sort of claim.

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Original portions Copyright 1999 Bruce E. Hayden,all rights reserved
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Bruce E. Hayden                      bhayden[_at_]acm.org
Phoenix, Arizona                     bhayden[_at_]ieee.org
                                     bhayden[_at_]copatlaw.com