From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2013 09:06:07 -0600

Good questions, Jim!

One would hope that the answer to your first question is yes,
particularly if and when Cambridge follows the practice of some other
university presses in omitting parts of a book from the print edition
and including it instead only at a website, as this Stanford book did
with its lengthy 41-page bibliography:
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=4495

To your second question i would answer perhaps, but the idea is
appearing with increasing frequency. A new book about the Kennedy
assassination by James Reston, Jr. titled "The Accidental Victim"
published by Zola Books in 2013 has this notice on the copyright page:
"The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that
are not owned by the publisher." Perhaps some lawyers got into the act
here and urged inclusion of this kind of statement to avoid liability,
making this a counterpart to product liability disclaimers?

The Reston book also includes this notice right after the standard
copyright notice: "All rights reserved. In accordance with the US
Copyright act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing
of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is
unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If
you would like to use material from the book (other than for review
purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the
publisher at [log in to unmask] Thank you for your support of the
author's rights."

Well, one wonders, what about the users' rights, recognized in the
Copyright Act in Section 107 (fair use), among other places? While
citing the Act (for which it uses lower case), this statement
completely ignores the range of exemptions built into the Act.  Well
over three decades ago, as chair of the AAUP Copyright Committee, I
went on a campaign to try persuading university presses to eschew such
"ad terrorem" notices (as L. Ray Patterson, progenitor of the original
Georgia Board of Regents policy that was the subject of the suit
brought against GSU, used to call them), but had little success, as
many publishers (including many university presses) still use them
today. It should be embarrassing to publishers that they don't know
the law any better than this. Professor Patterson, indeed, in
testifying before the Georgia House in the early 1980s, said:
"Publishers often disregard the right of fair use and act as if it did
not exist. Many books, for example, contain a statement such as this .
. ." and goes on to cite another version of this notice. It is just
plain dumb for publishers to continue this practice.

If a publisher still wants to do this, I prefer the following wording,
which actually appeared in a book published in 1973: "We have gone to
considerable difficulty and expense to assemble a staff of
necromancers, sorcerers, shamans, conjurers, and lawyers to visit
nettlesome and mystifying discomforts on any ninny who endeavors to
reproduce or transmit this book in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including information storage or retrieval
systems, without permission from the publisher. Watch yourself!"

Sandy Thatcher


At 12:47 PM -0500 12/4/13, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2013 14:58:20 -0500
>
>> From a new scholarly book (2011) from Cambridge University Press, at
>
> the foot of the copyright page:
>
> "Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence
> or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites
> referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any
> content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate."
>
> (1) Do they imply they *do* guarantee persistence and accuracy of
> their own websites that may be referenced?
>
> (2) Does this not belabor the obvious?  Where in the Press hierarchy
> did this idea come from and to whom did it seem a good idea?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.