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