From: Jennifer Howard <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2013 03:02:04 +0000
Perhaps Alicia Wise could comment on this from Elsevier's perspective.
Best,
Jennifer Howard
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 12, 2013, at 9:42 PM, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Laura Quilter <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 20:51:50 -0500
>
> You have to sign in writing a transfer of copyright in the US. So,
> Elsevier's copyright statement on your articles is what some have
> termed "copyfraud". They certainly don't have the right to "enforce"
> your copyright, and if they try to do so, you should push back --
> and hopefully make this widely-known!
>
> I suspect, actually, that a significant fraction of the so-called
> copyright holdings of large academic publishers can't actually be
> documented, and thus really belongs to the original authors, under
> US law. Sadly there's probably no way to actually figure out the
> numbers for this.
>
> Laura
>
> ----------------------------------
> Laura Markstein Quilter / [log in to unmask]
> Attorney, Geek, Militant Librarian, Teacher
>
> Copyright and Information Policy Librarian
> University of Massachusetts, Amherst
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Lecturer, Simmons College, GSLIS
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 6:38 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> From: Bob Persing <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 09:17:11 -0500
>>
>>
>> On 12/10/2013 1:00 AM, LIBLICENSE-L automatic digest system wrote:
>>>
>>> Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 15:40:57 -0500
>>> From: LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Subject: Re: Elsevier's Unforced Error
>>>
>>> From: "Pikas, Christina K." <[log in to unmask]>
>>> Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2013 09:49:22 -0500
>>>
>>> At the risk of coming off as an Elsevier defender.... I'd like to make
>>> some points in response:
>>>
>>> 1) Academia.edu is a private company running on venture capital -
>>> presumably they aspire to make money on the content that users upload
>>>
>>> 2) Authors signed a legal agreement with the publisher to transfer
>>> copyright. (many would argue that they shouldn't have, but they did,
>>> or they wouldn't have been published)
>>
>> I think this is too broad a statement, at least in the case of Elsevier.
>>
>> I wrote several articles for an Elsevier journal in the early 2000s.
>> At that time, they routinely sent authors a Transfer of Copyright
>> form, and a cover letter which read in part:
>>
>> "If we do not hear from you by return, the article will carry a line
>> in place of the copyright line merely indicating that Elsevier
>> published the article."
>>
>> I never signed or returned any of the copyright forms. Yet every one
>> of the articles, when published, included the line:
>>
>> "© 200[x] Elsevier Science, Inc."
>>
>> If one of these articles was offered by a company like academia.edu,
>> would Elsevier have the legal right to send them a takedown notice? I
>> don't know. A court might say that since I didn't protest against the
>> copyright statements when they were published, I tacitly agreed to
>> them. Whether they would or not, though, I think the question is less
>> obvious than it's been represented.
>>
>> Bob Persing
>> Univ. of PA Library
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