On 10 April 2015 at 20:00, Heather Morrison <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca> wrote:
> is PLOS and not the author that is the Licensor? > That's a fair reading. > Two reasons why this is important: > > 1. If other publishers are making works available to PLOS under CC-BY > licenses, do they have the right to do so? It has happened with works and > initiatives that I have been involved with more than once that works that > were released under other licenses were switched by someone to CC-BY > licenses without the knowledge or permission of the proper rights-holders. > This is not an ethical practice, and there are legal and relationship risks > for people and organizations that do this. Even publishers that fully own > copyright may not have the right to grant blanket commercial and re-use > rights downstream; the original author, for a variety of reasons, may not > have had such rights to grant. > There isn't a single answer to this - depending on what was transferred to the original publisher, what agreements were made with the original publisher, then they may or may not have rights to grant other licenses. In the majority of cases, they probably are going to be able to grant those licenses. Where they don't have those rights, and don't seek to obtain those rights, and yet grant the license anyway, then the proper right-holder can take the matter to court, and seek appropriate damages. You can reasonably expect that publishers will actually make all reasonable efforts to ensure they have the correct rights before granting a different licence - they may not be too worried about an individual author taking action against them, but as you say, the author may not be the affected party, and it's unlikely that they want to risk being pursued by a shark. > 2. When the publisher is the Licensor, note that a CC Licensor has no > obligation whatsoever to continue to make the work available at all, never > mind for free or under the same license conditions. A publisher CC-BY > licensor is fully within their rights to switch these works to toll access, > change the license and/or to sell their business to another entity that > prefers a toll access model (unless there is a separate contract with the > author that forbids this). Note (again) that author copyright retention can > co-exist with a publisher having rights as a Licensor. > The distinction of "a publisher" at this point is a little unhelpful. Any Licensor has no obligation to continue publishing something under a CC license, as far as the license itself is concerned. Although it's true that a publisher may - possibly following an acquisition - be more likely to re-publish works than an individual. (Even if there was an obligation to continue to make the work available at all, there would always be cases where that is unenforceable; for instance, a publisher going out of business and no-one acquiring the content - there would simply be no entity to hold to account) But practically, that is of little concern. You can stop publishing something with a CC license, but you can't revoke it. Anyone that has the work acquired under a CC license, who has done nothing to invalidate the CC license, can with proper attribution redistribute / republish that work [and perpetuate the license]. And as long as it can't be proven that the work was not acquired and used legally under a CC license (or rather, you can prove that the work was issued under a CC licence at some point, that we work in question corresponds to that CC licensed version, and that this has all been done legally in accordance with that CC licence) then there isn't anything that anybody can do about it. G
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