At 01:29 PM 6/28/2001 -0400, you wrote:
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)
Since the Tasini case was filed in 1993, major publishers have
protected their interests by asking for electronic publication rights
alongside traditional print publication rights. So the Tasini victory only
belongs to authors who signed agreements with publishers before 1993 or
so. If publishers in the future routinely demand and receive electronic
rights, then this could prevent self-archiving of postprints and other
forms of online distribution, or at least those forms of online
distribution that publishers believe would hurt their profits.
Peter
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Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy
Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, 47374
Email [email protected]
Web http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
Editor, The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/
