[GOAL] A reply to Professor Carroll

[CHARLES OPPENHEIM]

Professor Carroll has completely misrepresented me. As I made clear in my point 1, no-one can adapt or amend F without the publisher's permission. His misrepresentation must have been as a result of one of three things: (a) Prof Carroll never read my piece; (b) he read it and deliberately misconstrued what I wrote; or (c) he read it and did not understand what I wrote. I was totally clear that the author has rights to D, but cannot do anything with F. I now expect Prof Carroll to apologise for misrepresenting me and to explain which of (a), (b) or (c) was the reason. 

He also notes the UK IPO statement that infringement covers copying all or a substantial part of a copyright work. I agree, but such copying has to be AFTER F is published. One cannot copy something before it is made! So he is again referring to my case 1, and misrepresenting it.

Finally, Prof Caroll claims that most copyright assignments refer to assignment of the article AND MORE. Not in my experience as an author of hundreds of articles, and being in charge of assignments and licences in the 12 years I worked for scholarly publishers. So I further invite Prof Carroll to give me actual examples of such assignment wording. I asked Kevin, but he did not give an adequate reply.


(Professor Carroll wrote:

On Professor Oppenheim's view, the copyright owner's exclusive right of reproduction would be limited to controlling only verbatim copies.  If that were true, I would be free to republish the entire corpus of Elsevier publications if I make only small changes to the articles similar to the differences between a final draft and the final publication.  Needless to say, if this were the law, some clever publisher would have done just as I suggest.  But, this is not the law in the US or in the UK.
So even if the publisher were to be assigned rights only in the final version of an article ­ and most publication agreements are not this limited  the scope of those rights would preclude posting of substantially similar
versions whether those versions were created before or after the published version is produced. (US law uses the term "substantially similar" whereas UK law asks whether the copyright work has been copied "in substantial part"
but it effectively means the same thing in this context.  See http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-about/c-economic.htm)

 
Professor Charles Oppenheim
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