Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

Thread: Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...

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Re: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...
United States	2007-08-21 12:59:55
Stevan, the problem is becoming clearer. You feel that an author still has some rights in an article even after he or she has signed away all rights to that article. Specifically, you believe the author retains the ability to give away copies of the article, even in a systematic fashion, upon demand. I personally agree with you that authors should be able to do this. But if they want to do it, then they need to stop turning over all of their copyrights to publishers, and instead explicitly retain these rights themselves. If they do sign a copyright transfer agreement that transfers all rights to the publisher, then the authors have no more legal right to make one of the articles that they authored available through your system then they would have to provide one of my articles. In both cases, all of the copyright rights, including the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute a work, belongs to someone else. The bottom line: you can't sign a legal contract with binding terms that transfers all of your rights and then claim that you can do something else because it is 'traditional' or because it is what you really meant. If you want to be able to do the things you want to do, use the Scholars Commons Addendum Engine to generate a contract amendment that preserves those rights for you. And when you have done that, you are not using 'fair use' to deliver those copies to users - but are instead exploiting a right that you have retained. You wrote: "Anyone who imagines that an author can (or should) be prevented from photo-copying his *own* article for whatever use he sees fit is living on another planet." Well, I haven't seen an author get sued for copying his or her own article yet, but we have had one faculty member here get charged $400 to reproduce a figure from one of his articles, and a graduate student be charged $1500 to reproduce one of his articles in his dissertation. Stupid? Yes. Legal? Also yes - because in both cases, the authors signed a legally binding document that transferred all of their rights to the publisher. Peter B. Hirtle pbh6cornell.edu