From: Laura Quilter <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 21:50:44 -0500

There are ways of copyright being wielded short of litigation, and I
have seen many. And it's nice to believe that authors would rather not
be bothered with the detail, but that's not really an ethical
justification for the one-sided contacting that prevails in academic
publishing.

On Mar 8, 2016 12:03 AM, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 00:42:14 -0600
> Subject: Re: SciHub
> "Relieved" of copyright protection, seriously?  I've never met a
> scholar who published with a university press that would speak in
> those terms.  That smacks of coercion which, if actually present,
> would invalidate a contract.
>
> The truth of the matter is that very few academic authors want to be
> bothered with all the details that are involved in negotiating and
> selling licenses for subsidiary uses. And few care to become experts
> in knowing what kind of fees to set, what clauses to include in
> licenses, how to defend themselves when license terms are violated,
> etc. That is why, in academic publishing generally, "all rights"
> transfers have been standard. Academic publishers have taken on the
> burden of fulfilling the functions that in trade publishing are
> handled by literary agents. Every academic contract I have seen
> provides for splitting the income from subsidiary rights with authors,
> usually 50/50 and, for some rights, 75/25 in favor of the author.
> Authors are not forced to sign these contracts; they do so because
> they don't want the responsibilities that come with handling
> subsidiary rights.
>
> Also, in the relatively few cases where authors express an interest in
> handling a specific subsidiary right, say, a translation into a
> foreign language about which the author has some expertise, the
> publisher generally cedes that right back to the author so that the
> author can handle the transaction separately.
>
> You talk about copyright protection being wielded against authors. Can
> you cite any examples of academic publishers suing their authors for
> infringement of copyright?
>
> Sandy Thatcher