Re: L.Rev (C) Release

On 28 Oct 1999, Jessica Litman <litman[_at_]mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> On 10/27/99, Bruce Hayden <bhayden[_at_]ieee.org> wrote:
> >
> > But that brings me to the next question, which is why do
> > the parties asking for these assignments think that the
> > party signing has the right to give such rights away?
> > Typically, the person who wrote the work is the one signing.
> > While this may be effective for students, for most everyone
> > else, there is arguably a work-for-hire situation involved.
>
> Universities have gotten themselves into this mess by declining
> to change their copyright policies in the wake of the 1976 Act. (Most
> of them, anyway. Wayne State's employment contract reserves copyright
> in faculty scholarship to the employees.) Since Universities encourage,
> nay require, faculty to publish, and since they leave the individual
> faculty members to their own devices in arranging the details of
> publication, one can only assume that the writers of these articles
> are their universities' agents for the purposes of copyright assignment
> and license.

I don't see faculty writing as work for hire unless the writing is specifically commissioned. As I understand it, universities do not control their faculty members; research, writing, or related decisions. Faculty are not agents of the universities. They take their names and their copyrights with them when they go. Outside sponsors of research, accounting for 80% of academic research spending, also leave the writing and submission decisions to researchers' sense of the best opportunities for dissemination.

Universities locked onto fair use around 1970 when it became clear that case law supported it. They cut library spending with the unfounded idea that everyone would work from cheap photocopies. That policy backfired because (A) reduced printings forced publishers to raise prices; (B) it still takes an average of 16 days to delivery a library photocopy (according to a 1997 study from the Association of Research Libraries.) (C) it decimated many of the most "comprehensive" library collections, and (D) many photocopy requests fail entirely. I think university managers should take responsibility for the library crisis they created rather than blame authors and publishers.

My impression is that the broad attack on copyright and library spending that emerged in the 1980s is related to a larger campaign aimed at overturning tenure, faculty governance, and the influence of associations on policy, management, and accreditation. My impression is also that university managers are guided by financial goals before anything else, no matter how they rationalize.

Albert Henderson
Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532[_at_]compuserve.com> Received on Wed Nov 03 1999 - 22:29:30 GMT