On Mon, 2 Sep 2002, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> This is a red herring, conflating researchers' criteria for
> what counts as a formal publication with trade criteria for
> protecting toll-revenues.
This is not a red herring. I provided the definition of publication
as seen by the U.S. Copyright Law. As indicated by your post,
you have a special meaning of publication that does not agree
with the law. It is not totally clear from your post which
definition the publishers use.
> THIS is the sense of publication that Gene is talking about and this
> should already have been obvious from the fact that he uses the word
> "publication" in both senses in the very same sentence above, in
> answering (in the negative) his own question, namely, "Is Acknowledged
> Self-Archiving Prior Publication?" And he is addressing this question
> to fellow-researchers -- authors, referees, and editors -- not to drafters
> of copyright law.
I must wonder why you submit your post to CNI-COPYRIGHT. What are
you trying to accomplish?
> WHY was this question not addressing copyright law or copyright
> lawyers? Because, if you will look carefully at every one of the criteria
> invoked in the legal "definition" of publication above -- "sale, transfer
> of ownership, rental, lease, lending" -- every single one of them is
> utterly irrelevant to the special, anomalous literature which is the only
> one of which we are speaking here. For refereed research publications are
> all author give-aways: Their authors do not seek to sell, rent, lease,
> lend or otherwise transfer their ownership. ...
The U.S. Copyright Law does not require sale to be at least $0.01 (one
cent). If an author wants to give the copies of his article to public
at no cost, the law considers it as a sale at $0.00. It is like
putting a stack of 100 copies of his article on one corner of street
so that anyone walking by can take one for free.
Likewise, if the author gives a copy of his article to each library
for lending to public at no cost, the law considers it as a publication
even though he does not earn any royalty.
> .... Their "moral ownership" --
> i.e., the fact that it is they who wrote them and not someone else --
> is of course retained by these special authors, as by all authors. But
> the texts themselves are all given away; not a penny of royalties or
> fees or other form of income from their sale/rental/lease/lending is
> received or sought by their authors.
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#5
The law does not recognize "moral ownership". You are making it up.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo_at_voicenet.com>
Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923
in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright
owners' prisons: 5,962
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
post in the public domain.
Received on Thu Sep 05 2002 - 00:13:08 BST