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