OATP primary |
| Sly, sweeping idea from Cory @Doctorow. Here's an idea from +Cory… Posted: 12 Oct 2015 03:28 AM PDT "Here's an idea from +Cory Doctorow, proposed in a series of tweets: "How to get every academic paper ever published into an open-access repository, in one easy step....Until a couple decades ago, virtually every university in America had work-for-hire arrangements with their faculty....These faculty, therefore, didn't hold the copyright they nominally assigned to the academic publishers over the past century....Thanks to copyright extension (not a phrase you'll see me type often!) we know that all those papers are still in copyright....Virtually everything behind academic publishers' paywall is therefore infringing, and subject to strict liability....Get one university, a Big 10 with sovereign immunity, to bring suit against the major academic publishers....The total damages would exceed the planet's total GDP several times over....The uni could limit itself to dead faculty without intact estates, so no risk of publishers suing the academics for indemnification....The university therefore offers to settle with the publishers: "Put everything in open access and we'll call it even."...To stir the pot, start by sending registered letters to the publishers' insurers, warning them that this is a potential liability...." Cory and I talked about this briefly at last weekend's #F2i (Freedom to Innovate) conference at MIT <http://freedom2innovate.mit.edu/>. Among other things, I said I'd be surprised if a real-world court would invalidate all those past publishing contracts or find publishers guilty of mass infringement. But that was a prediction, not an objection. Courts could dismiss the idea even if legally sound, and we should not underestimate their tendency to protect incumbents. (Indeed, this was a theme of the #F2i conference.) But I added that I didn't think anyone had dived deeply into this idea to examine the legal merits or real-world obstacles. If I was right on the second point, then I hope someone will dive in. The idea deserves a closer look. If the analysis has been done or started somewhere, I hope someone can post links to the comment section...." |
| Posted: 12 Oct 2015 02:53 AM PDT A proposal in a series of tweets: "How to get every academic paper ever published into an open-access repository, in one easy step....Until a couple decades ago, virtually every university in America had work-for-hire arrangements with their faculty....These faculty, therefore, didn't hold the copyright they nominally assigned to the academic publishers over the past century....Thanks to copyright extension (not a phrase you'll see me type often!) we know that all those papers are still in copyright....Virtually everything behind academic publishers' paywall is therefore infringing, and subject to strict liability....Get one university, a Big 10 with sovereign immunity, to bring suit against the major academic publishers....The total damages would exceed the planet's total GDP several times over....The uni could limit itself to dead faculty without intact estates, so no risk of publishers suing the academics for indeminification....The university therefore offers to settle with the publishers: "Put everything in open access and we'll call it even."...To stir the pot, start by sending registered letters to the publishers' insurers, warning them that this is a potential liability...." |
| You are subscribed to email updates from OATP primary. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
No comments:
Post a Comment