From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2014 21:17:57 -0500

Do  we have a tempest in a teapot here?  I can't and won't speak to
the legal issues, but it seems to me that the business issues here are
not very big.

Let's suppose that there is a judgment that publishers don't in fact
have all the rights they claim they do.  Halelujah!  So now all the
articles that are "liberated" by this ruling can now be posted
wherever the author wants to.  But these would all be articles that
were already published.  The economic value of articles, especially in
STEM fields, declines rapidly after publication (the rationale for
embargoes of 12 months before material is made OA).  So we now have
widespread availability of the older stuff, which is worth far less
than the new stuff.

If publishers continued with their past practices in light of such a
judgment, they would be fools.  They would quickly change the language
of their contracts in order to tie up the authors' multiple rights. So
going forward the implications of this ruling are small.

I can see how this situation would appeal to copyright geeks, but for
the rest of us, it's a hiccup and then we all get back to business.

Joe Esposito


On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 6:31 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Klaus Graf <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2014 21:35:44 +0100
>
> For the German law feel free to read my statement in German at
>
> http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/664972316/
>
> It depends from the contract if a publisher has exclusive rights which
> forbidd the author to publish another version.
>
> D and F are the same work and have the same copyright (because the
> derivative work D of F or F of D - the chronology isn't relevant - is
> NOT a "free" derivative use = "Freie Bearbeitung").
>
> But concerning contractual law I have serious doubts that publishers
> get such exclusive rights according German law.
>
> Klaus Graf