On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Marvin Margoshes wrote: > There are individuals who are knowingly pirating copyright materials, such > as music, writing and software, on the 'Net, and publisher organizations are > aggressively seeking them out with search engines and going after them. > Underground groups may feel that they have nothing to lose anyway if they > are caught, but I doubt that applies to the individuals who would misuse the > scientific and other scholarly materials this discussion is concerned with.
It is not advancing the thinking on this topic to keep on repeating that violating copyright is breaking the law, and citing pirated music, writing and software as examples, when the POINT here is precisely that the "pirates" in question are the authors themselves, and what they are doing is GIVING AWAY their own research findings, for which no one has paid them a penny. May I suggest that "self-pirating" is what is at issue here, to contrast it clearly with all those other cases (for which copyright law was designed), and that "self-pirating" is an incoherent notion? What IS coherent is the advice to authors (given here repeatedly) not to sign away their right to give free unto others what they have given free unto their publishers. And that if you have foolishly already signed that right away for a final accepted draft, then simply self-archive instead a penultimate draft, with an appended list of errata and updates! Now that (if there were any sense to any of this) would simply be the end of of this discussion -- unless someone wanted to start haggling over what the legal distance between the final draft and the penult must be in order to violate copyright! (But note that plagiarism is not at issue here, as it would be if someone ELSE were trying to pass off 90% of my words as his own; for, again, we must remind ourselves that it is "self-piracy" that we are discussing here...) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM