The Value of Copyright: A Publisher's Perspective - The Scholarly Kitchen
lterrat's bookmarks 2017-02-08
Summary:
"Rick Anderson asked me recently to present a talk, as part of a panel, on the 'Publisher’s View of Copyright', at the upcoming Research to Reader Conference in London later this month. If you are going to stand up in front of an audience, it’s always best to know what you are talking about. While I have a general sense of what I think about the subject, and opinions to match, I thought it would be helpful to dig a little deeper, to make sure what I know is actually correct, and to try and find evidence and arguments that support what I am trying to say. First, a caveat: there is no one view of copyright that fits all publishers. The publisher of a poetry magazine will likely feel differently about aspects of copyright when compared to say the publisher of your local phone book — yes they do still exist. Indeed, even within scholarly publishing there is a range of attitudes towards copyright.
In this post I start with the basics. I move on to describe some interesting legal cases, and follow with a look at the shift towards the CC-BY Creative Commons license. I leave you with a sense of where I come down on these issues, and then ask you to let me know where you sit.
Let’s look at some facts on the ground about copyright, bearing in mind that while the spirit of copyright protection is global, copyright laws in a particular country are national. Having said this, international treaties have greatly helped harmonize an international approach to copyright law, the two main treaties being the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention."