Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Greg Newby [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Some electronic journals, some conferences and some print journals now let authors retain copyright or, if they keep copyright, allow authors to do what they please with their work. Usenix is really good with this. You agree not to re-publish anything for a period of one year (to cover their print distribution), although you're allowed to put a copy on your home page. After that, you're free to do what you like. They also make all their stuff available online at no charge after a year. This is why I preferentially submit papers to Usenix rather than ACM or IEEE, I want to get the information out there where it does some good, not have it locked up in a copyright prison for all eternity. I can't imagine that the ACM is going to make much (if anything) from the reprint rights of a ten-year-old article on distributed search algorithms, but by locking it up, very few people ever have access to it. (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended for public distribution inaccessible violates the creator's moral rights? I know that doesn't apply in the US, but in other countries it might work. Moral rights can't be assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you. Any lawyers out there?). It's far more typical, though, for the journal to get all rights, except perhaps classroom use (aka fair use) by the author. That's more traditional for publishers like IEEE and ACM. OTOH they seem to turn a blind eye to people making papers available on their home pages, even if the publishing agreement says you shouldn't do that. I suspect the backlash would be too strong if they tried to clamp down on this, although I wish it'd be formalised in some way rather than leaving it as a grey area. Peter.
RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Peter wrote: (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended for public distribution inaccessible violates the creator's moral rights? I know that doesn't apply in the US, but in other countries it might work. Moral rights can't be assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you. Peter has an interesting point, since in addition to common law applies to a trend in copyright that is prevalent in Europe (and presumably some other countries), but rather alien to the US, taking that trend further. For those readers not familiar with this trend, there is the gist of it: Everybody on this list knows that what buyers of bit strings may or not do with such bit strings, under pain of incarceration and, should you resist that effectively, death, is under global attack by the MPAA and its cohorts. What US observers are frequently less aware of is that the same right is as much under attack, albeit for very different reasons, by the European cultural elite which has been as effective as the MPAA in working on their shared goal of dismantling what in the US would be called the doctrine of first sale. In brief, this doctrine states that if you buy a book, painting, or DVD, you may read or watch it for as many times as you please (including not at all), loan it to your friends, donate it to a library, sell it to somebody else, or chuck it out with the trash. The MPAA desires to dismantle the doctrine of first sale for the easily understandable reason that the MPAA's members would like to approximate as closely as possible to a state in which each person watching a movie has to pay the studios each time the DVD is watched. If the technology existed at a cost acceptable for a consumer device to count the number of people present in a room watching a particular DVD, the MPAA likely would lobby Congress to mandate that technology's inclusion to permit for the collection of per-watcher/watching licensing fees. The other half of the shears cutting away at the public's right to entertain themselves with the artwork they purchased in any way they please is represented by parts of the art culture of significant political clout, in particular in Europe. Bills are pending or have already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. Between the corporate objective of charging the readers of a book each time they read it and the elitist objective of forcing the buyer to read a book they bought at least on occasion, with both groups united in their zeal to impose their respective view points onto the public by force of law and the men with sub-machine guns the law employs, the future of copyright proves to be interesting. But you already knew that part. While the European art circles clamoring for such moral right protection acts would undoubtedly denounce the assertion that they are working hand in glove with the MPAA's objective of dismantling the doctrine of first sale to the detriment of society, the two groups in fact are natural allies or pawns, depending on their level of awareness of the situation. Undoubtedly this has not been overlooked by the MPAA, though I suspect the European artists are blissfully unaware of how they have helped and continue to help to grease the MPAA's skids. --Lucky
Re: CDR: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet
On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Tom wrote: actually, as with most laws, the basic idea behind the moral rights isn't that bad, it just got perverted. if used differently, the morale rights part could well be used to put a limit on the corporate abuse of copyright. for example, I could envision an argument that an artist sues the RIAA for abusing his copyrighted works for bogus lawsuits against P2P systems. I guess the argument would boil down to who has copyright and who or what has moral right. For sculpture and painting the duplication rights are kind of obvious, but the destruction/use/first sale is complicated. For digital art/music duplication rights are complicated, and use in other works (fair use) gets really messy. And if I take a digital photo (well many pictures) of a sculpture and reconstruct it in a 3D virtual world, is that fair use or copyright violation? Blech, this is gonna get worse before it gets better! Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Artist's rights? [was: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet]
From: Mike Rosing[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Lucky Green wrote: The other half of the shears cutting away at the public's right to entertain themselves with the artwork they purchased in any way they please is represented by parts of the art culture of significant political clout, in particular in Europe. Bills are pending or have already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. the american artists are also trying to get this kind of right in place for themselves. The perspective isn't so much copyright as it is leave it alone forever. But it amounts to the same thing. As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was site specific, and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm I frequently walked by the Arc, and it was a powerful presence, but once it ceased to be a suprise, it was mainly an irritating obstacle. One of Serra's arguments was that the Arc echoed the staircase of a courthouse across the street. I wonder if he'd have sued them for altering that building? http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic. Peter Trei
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Lucky Green wrote: Peter wrote: (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended for public distribution inaccessible violates the creator's moral rights? I know that doesn't apply in the US, but in other countries it might work. Moral rights can't be assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you. Peter has an interesting point, since in addition to common law applies to a trend in copyright that is prevalent in Europe (and presumably some other countries), but rather alien to the US, taking that trend further. [...snip...] Bills are pending or have already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. [...snip...] True, but it is an old process. In French law there has been a concept of moral rights in a work for a very long time. These are inalienable, you can't sell them. The two most important are (IIR the jargon correctly) integrity and paternity. The right of integrity means that if someone buys the copyright to a work, then alters the work in a way that could affect the reputation of the originator, they can be sued. So, for example, if a painter paints a picture, sells it to a publisher, then the publisher prints a defaced version as a book cover, the painter can perhaps sue the publisher. The right of paternity is the right to be known as the originator. It was imported into English law in, IIRC, 1989, but has to be asserted - which is why nearly all books published in Britain these days have a note asserting the rights of the author to be known as the author. These rights did not exist in the USA ( still don't, quite), but the US didn't really have copyright law in the European sense until the 1980s anyway - what they /called/ copyright was something you had to apply for and register - very different from our English tradition which is based on an idea of the natural property rights of an artist or author in their own work, and so has never had to be registered or applied for, any more than you have to get government permission to own the clothes you stand up in. The moral rights limit the freedom of action of publishers to the benefit of artists and authors, not, as far as I know the ultimate purchasers, but then IANAL and IA-certainly-NA-French-L. Some people who know a lot more about it than I do have said that English law traditionally treated copyright as a matter of property, French as a matter of personality, and the US as a sort of government licenced monopoly or patent. But they are all much closer to each other these days, with international copyright law being a compromise between the old systems. Ken Brown
Re: CDR: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet
On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 06:27:04AM -0700, Mike Rosing wrote: simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. the american artists are also trying to get this kind of right in place for themselves. The perspective isn't so much copyright as it is leave it alone forever. But it amounts to the same thing. actually, as with most laws, the basic idea behind the moral rights isn't that bad, it just got perverted. if used differently, the morale rights part could well be used to put a limit on the corporate abuse of copyright. for example, I could envision an argument that an artist sues the RIAA for abusing his copyrighted works for bogus lawsuits against P2P systems. -- New GPG Key issued (old key expired): http://web.lemuria.org/pubkey.html pub 1024D/2D7A04F5 2002-05-16 Tom Vogt [EMAIL PROTECTED] Key fingerprint = C731 64D1 4BCF 4C20 48A4 29B2 BF01 9FA1 2D7A 04F5
Re: Artist's rights? [was: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet]
These laws don't really get into cyberpunks territory, because they are about rights that are reserved to the original artist, and cannot be transferred to publishers or distributors or record companies, and can only be possessed by natural persons, not corporations. So (in France, not the USA) a musician or a film directory might be able to sue Time Warner or Sony if they insist on adding watermarks or copy protection to a work, but neither could sue a cypherpunk for taking the watermarks off. In the USA the moral rights, AFAICT, wouldn't apply to the copy or reproduction anyway, only the original. Trei, Peter wrote: As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was site specific, and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm But the important point about that is that the artist lost! According to the website the tried breach of contract, trademark violations, copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment rights and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other than to give a few days work to some lawyers. [...] http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic. Thanks for that - I hadn't heard of VARA before. No real reason I should have I suppose, it being in the USA and me not. It seems much more limited than the French moral rights, in that it only applies to unique objects, not to texts or to broadcast or recorded work. According to the commentary in that paper the US experience with VARA seems to agree with what I have read about the French laws (in books and papers trying to explain them to us English, who never had such rules before), in that few actions are taken under it and that they are almost always relatively unknown sculptors objecting to treatment of a work of public art. With the implication that they are doing it more for the publicity than for the damages, which are either never awarded (in the USA) or are tiny (in France). Ken
RE: Artist's rights? [was: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet]
Ken Brown[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote: Trei, Peter wrote: As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was site specific, and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm But the important point about that is that the artist lost! According to the website the tried breach of contract, trademark violations, copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment rights and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other than to give a few days work to some lawyers. [...] http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic. Serra's work was moved in 1989, about a year before VARA went into effect. I suspect that 'Tilted Arc' affair was one of VARA's motivations (though any legislator who voted for it should have been condemned to have a Serra sculpture placed in front of his house for a year). Peter
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
On Monday, June 10, 2002, at 08:55 PM, Greg Newby wrote: On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote: My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently? Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation in the publishing industry. Ejournals are making in-roads, especially in some fields, and are breaking some patterns. Print publishers are working to extend and embrace some of the new models. Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued serials crisis where the price increases in print journals far exceeds any other cost. There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing. Anyone here who has not already done so should immediately type xxx.lanl.gov into their browser. (No, the xxx is not a typo, nor is it a porn site.) This is where physics papers are getting published. The print journals are surviving, barely, but I think the handwriting is already on the wall. As libraries balk at paying $6000 per year for Journal of Advanced Aptical Foddering and as the referee system goes online as well (*), the print journals will financially fail. Maybe no one will notice. As John Baez has pointed out, most of the grad students he deals with never visit the campus library. All papers of interest in cosmology, quantum physics, solid state, etc. are being published on the arXhive sites. In the last few months, I've been using this system extensively, and have downloaded about 2500 pages of PDF files. I know how many pages because I've printed out most of the papers. Five reams of paper later For why my printing out the papers does not vitiate my arguments about the death of tree-based publishing, think about it for a moment. (* The referee system could be more richly nuanced with an online rating system. At the simplest, a vote of N referees, as today. But some papers could be marked speculative, but not bullshit (or somesuch). In other words, a two-dimensional rating system, or higher. And, as all Cypherpunks know, the longer-term future is anyone can publish, but expect users to have sophisticated agents filtering the junk. For the next decade or so, I expect the xxx.lanl.gov approach will be sufficiently better than paper publishing that it will dominate. Then will come the more advanced approaches. But tree-based publishing is dying.) For those concerned with the sanctity and durability of paper, all sorts of obvious solutions exist. CD-ROMS, DVDs, archival-quality tape and discs, distributed publishing a la Eternity (and my own 1995 proposal), digital time-stamping, etc. --Tim May Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote: On Monday 10 June 2002 22:20, Jim Choate wrote: On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Jason Holt wrote: copyright issues? Why haven't I seen other papers published on usenet and such before going to press? This is a joke right? Copyright, they want it as the exclusive distributor which they can't do if it's been published somewhere else. Some electronic journals, some conferences and some print journals now let authors retain copyright or, if they keep copyright, allow authors to do what they please with their work. It's far more typical, though, for the journal to get all rights, except perhaps classroom use (aka fair use) by the author. Which is especially impressive since some journals not only wanted the authors to basically give up their copyright but wanted the authors to pay for publication. (And then charge the author's institution a fortune to subscribe to the same journal.) I think that there are still some journals iwth these page charges, in which the employer or (more likely) some grants are expected to pay for publication. This was prevalent in the sciences, not arts and humanities. I never had to pay any, but information science (me) is more like a social science than a hard science in many ways. I *have*, this year, been told that a journal would be happy to publish my screen shots in color for a few $thousand per page, but would do them in BW free. My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently? Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation in the publishing industry. Ejournals are making in-roads, especially in some fields, and are breaking some patterns. Print publishers are working to extend and embrace some of the new models. Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued serials crisis where the price increases in print journals far exceeds any other cost. There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing. -- Greg
