Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2016 07:31:35 +0000 They may not have got to the stage of going to court, but academic publishers have used copyright to limit authors from distributing their own work: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-12/17/elsevier-versus-open-access David On 7 Mar 2016, at 22:32, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2016 00:42:14 -0600 Subject: Re: SciHub "Relieved" of copyright protection, seriously? I've never met a scholar who published with a university press that would speak in those terms. That smacks of coercion which, if actually present, would invalidate a contract. The truth of the matter is that very few academic authors want to be bothered with all the details that are involved in negotiating and selling licenses for subsidiary uses. And few care to become experts in knowing what kind of fees to set, what clauses to include in licenses, how to defend themselves when license terms are violated, etc. That is why, in academic publishing generally, "all rights" transfers have been standard. Academic publishers have taken on the burden of fulfilling the functions that in trade publishing are handled by literary agents. Every academic contract I have seen provides for splitting the income from subsidiary rights with authors, usually 50/50 and, for some rights, 75/25 in favor of the author. Authors are not forced to sign these contracts; they do so because they don't want the responsibilities that come with handling subsidiary rights. Also, in the relatively few cases where authors express an interest in handling a specific subsidiary right, say, a translation into a foreign language about which the author has some expertise, the publisher generally cedes that right back to the author so that the author can handle the transaction separately. You talk about copyright protection being wielded against authors. Can you cite any examples of academic publishers suing their authors for infringement of copyright? Sandy Thatcher