In times of transition, laws sometimes become obsolete and fetishizing such laws has never been very helpful. If my memory serves me right, English law long kept the requirement that any car going through a city had to be preceded by a man on foot wearing a red flag to warn the population. That law, again if my memory serves me right, was finally removed from the books in the 60's, having been openly flaunted by everybody for decades.
It seem that we are facing a similar situation here with regard to the handling of copyright in the area of scholarly publishing. As Stevan Harnad rightly points out, the intellectual property at stakes is the individuals' own, not somebody else's . As a rule, they have not sold it, but given it away and it increasingly looks foolish, exactly as the man with the red flag looks foolish. The real nature of scientific papers is becoming increasingly clear to a growing number of people and its commodity status is being increasingly questioned. Laws that appear foolish are dangerous laws because they cannot be obeyed and, as a result, they threaten the whole legal structure. Yet. we do need a solid legal structure and there is no reason to weaken our legal structure through blind obedience to stupid laws or unjust laws. In short, we are quickly moving to the brink of a wholesale re-evaluation of how copyright should be handled in the case of scholarly publishing and it may be that the law will have to be modified in the process. Scientific authors are interested in moral rights (to use a continental terminology), not financial or commercial rights. Jean-Claude Guédon Le Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Marvin a écrit : > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Stevan Harnad <har...@coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk> > To: <american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org> > Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 12:31 PM > Subject: Re: Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do? > > > > On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Marvin Margoshes wrote: > > > > tw> From: Thomas J. Walker <t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu> > > tw> To find out what those attending my two most recent talks were willing > to > > tw> do to promote free access, I asked in a questionnaire if they would... > > tw> (3) post their old articles on their home pages without permissions > from > > tw> copyright-holding publishers? [80% would] > > > > > mm> Interesting that 80% said that they will break the law. > > mm> Is ignorance of the law or something else behind this? > > > > I think it is the very opposite of ignorance that is behind this. > > > > It is an awakening to what is actually at stake here for research and > > researchers, and how fundamentally different the copyright function is > > for the fee/royalty-based literature, for which it was intended, as > > opposed to the give-away literature that is at issue here: the refereed > > journal literature. > <snip> > > Very interesting! It appears that to a large group of intelligent, educated > persons, the letter and spirit of the law simply don't matter. Or do they > think that copyright law leaves them the right to the material that they > signed away? > > You base your argument on a distinction; does copyright law make that > distinction? Not to my knowledge, but I'm willing to learn. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jean-Claude Guédon Département de littérature comparée Université de Montréal CP 6128, Succursale « Centre-ville » Montréal, Qc H3C 3J7 Canada Tél. 1-514-343-6208 Fax 1.514-343-2211 "INTERNET IS FOR EVERYONE!" Join the Internet Society and help to make it so. See you at INET2000, Yokohama, Japan July 18-21, 2000 http://www.isoc.org/inet2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------