From: Michael Carroll <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 10:11:08 -0500

Hi Bob,

No, in the United States, you can't transfer the exclusive rights under
copyright without signing a written agreement to that effect.  In the
absence of a signed writing, the author retains the exclusive rights and
the publisher is said to have been granted an implied non-exclusive
license to publish.  In the absence of a signed writing, a publisher that
asserts that it owns the copyright in a misleading copyright notice is
itself legally problematic.

-Mike

Michael W. Carroll
Professor of Law and Director,
Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property
American University Washington College of Law
Washington, D.C. 20016

Faculty page: http://www.wcl.american.edu/faculty/mcarroll/
Blog: http://carrollogos.blogspot.com
Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org
Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org


On 12/10/13 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