Dear Stevan, While I am fully aware of the distinction between the "give-away" literature and the writing-for-fee literature, I can't help but wonder if the US Supreme Court ruling (see below) will have implications for the scholarly literature, as publishers have been digitizing back issues of journal articles that were published before the arrival of electronic publishing and before there were electronic rights for authors to give away. In other words, could authors prevent publishers from digitizing the material that they do not have the electronic rights to, just as some publishers have been preventing authors from self-archiving? And what would this really mean, if anything?
Leslie Chan PUBLISHERS MUST SEEK AUTHORS' PERMISSION FOR ELECTRONIC REPRINTS The Supreme Court ruled that freelance writers must be compensated when publishers reprint their works in electronic form. The high court sided with National Writers' Union President Jonathan Tasini, ruling that transferring freelance authors' articles to CD-ROMs and online databases creates totally new editions of those articles--not revisions, as publishers had argued. American University professor of law Peter A. Jaszi said, "This decision seems to be a wonderful reaffirmation of the central importance of the creative individual in our copyright system." However, historians Ken Burns and Doris Kearns Goodwin said the ruling will harm intellectual research if publishers remove freelance articles from databases. (Chronicle of Higher Education Online, 26 June 2001)
