Just wanted to give y'all a heads-up on two things I'm working on that
might be TOS-useful. A related (and overlapping, but not quite the same)
blog post is up on Planet TOS at
http://blog.melchua.com/2011/09/30/hacking-on-copyright-addendums/.
Many of you will recall my outburst re: academic copyright assignment a
few weeks back.
(http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/20/in-which-mel-is-saddened-and-bewildered-by-academic-copyright-assignments/
and emails to this list around that time.)
Well, I started hacking on that with the help of our (awesome)
department librarian, Amy Van Epps. Specifically, we're looking at
copyright *addendums* that you can staple to the back of your mandatory
"yes, <publisher>, I will sign my soul and all my rights away" agreement
document -- think of the addendum as a vaccine against the copyright
assignment document, because it negates a bunch of the clauses in it and
lets you retain important controls over your work (for instance, you may
say that after $timeperiod you'll be able to distribute your work under
an open license).
There's some existing on about this which is totally solid on the legal
side, but it's largely (1) geared to academics and (2) nobody knows
about it, not even the academics it's geared towards.
For instance: http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/
There are also institution-specific ones that have adapted from this
upstream, and I'm trying to find and look at a collection of them too
(yay, legal text).
What we're working on right now is a copyright addendum that is friendly
to folks from the FOSS world -- doesn't assume an academic background or
a ton of copyright fluency -- and then once we find/make that, spreading
it as wide as humanly possible so that it actually gets used. (First
step: does Science Commons fill that need already?)
For those looking for more information on the topic of copyright (geared
towards authors who don't want their rights taken away),
http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/ is pretty awesome.
Summary: If you're submitting something to a conference/journal/etc and
get a copyright assignment form to sign, please consider looking at that
copyright addendum and seeing if it'll be useful to you to include that
stapled to the back -- it takes 5 extra minutes to keep your rights to
making your own work open and free and accessible to others.
And if you're interested in working on this sort of thing, or already
working on this sort of thing, please holler.
--Mel
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