[This message was posted on JISC-REPOSITORIES and is reproduced here
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On 15 Feb 2009, at 19:56, Charles Oppenheim wrote on the JISC-
REPOSITORIES mailing list:
> I agree that the publisher cannot demand destruction of copies made
> PRIOR to the assignment, but can rightly object to any subsequent
> copying by anyone, including the original author.
Charles' contributions to this discussion are stark, but make it clear
what the bottom line is in copyright law. If you have copyright, you
have the automatic right to make copies. If you don't have copyright,
you don't have the automatic right to make copies.
From other contributors, we know that a literal and unyielding
Status: O
Message-ID: <dummy3272820781_at_invented.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
interpretation of this law would make digital and online activities
impossible. We also know that publishing companies do not demand such
draconian restrictions on authors' activities.
The web has changed many things about the dissemination of
information: the expectation of copying as a fundamental part of the
transmission mechanism, the expectation of indexing and searching as a
fundamental part of information provision, the expectation of open
access to public funded information, the emergence of the knowledge
commons. The law has not yet caught up with these changes in society.
It hasn't even caught up with the personal computer revolution, let
alone the Internet, the Web, Web 2.0, the Semantic Web or the cloud.
That's an awfully big backlog of technology and emerging social
practice to accommodate in our legislation, and frankly there just
aren't enough legal minds on the job at the moment.
Most legal positions in the online and digital arenas are compromises,
fudges and emerging social agreements between parties. So it is
inevitable that repository staff are going to encounter problems when
faced with institutional managers who want definitive answers, cast-
iron guarantees and legal certainties. What we can provide instead is
the reassurance of a decade and a half of repository practice and case
history, emerging (and emerged) institutional policy, custom and
procedure. We (the repository community, JISC, funding councils and
institutions) should continue to work together to agree reasonable
practices that enable our own industry (the research industry) to
flourish, develop and compete internationally while allowing its
service industry (the primary and secondary publishing companies) the
space to build appropriate businesses that will facilitate that aim.
--
Les Carr
Lecturer, Researcher, Repository Manager, Repository Developer, Open
Access Advocate
Co-Director of the UK EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre in Web Science,
set up to examine the impact of the Web on society and vice versa.
But not a lawyer.
Received on Sun Feb 15 2009 - 23:14:10 GMT