[GOAL] Re: Sharing and reuse - not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy

[Heather Morrison]

On 2015-04-13, at 11:55 AM, Jean-Claude Guédon <jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca<mailto:jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca>>
 wrote:

3. The "simplicity of copyright"? This must be a joke. Think about the tension between copyright and authors' rights (with its associated "moral rights"). Think about copyright preserving only the order of words, but not the ideas, yet protecting derived works... How does "fair use" work in the US? How about outside the US? And I am not even a copyright specialist…

Copyright is indeed complex. There are reasons why authors under pressure to publish simply sign copyright agreements without reading or understanding the terms. I've read a number of such agreements; many are long, complicated and even contradictory. I have heard it said that today if we were to read all of the terms that we are asked to sign and agree to online, this would take a month out of every year. There is something profoundly wrong with this.

For the author needing to publish, signing over the copyright may seem like a simple matter. However, the same scholarly author is likely to be confused and stymied when they are not able to share the works of others with students and colleagues in the ways that make sense to them. Authors are also often frustrated by the digital rights management technologies designed to protect intellectual property which often also effectively frustrates such simple tasks as reading and note-taking that were often much simpler with print materials. Plus as Jean-Claude alludes to, this transfer of intellectual property fuels a scholarly publishing system dominated by a few large commercial players earning enormous profits and wielding power that is completely out of proportion with their contributions to scholarship. The profits of a few STM journal publishers contrast with the struggles of many traditional publishers, including society journal publishers and many university presses; this was not a healthy system even before the open access movement came along.

I also am not an expert on copyright, certainly not on a global scale. However, I am not sure that anyone else is, either. Even if someone fully understood copyright in every country today, copyright and other intellectual property laws continue to evolve - and rapidly. The Marrakesh Treaty which commits countries to enabling legislation providing for copyright exceptions for the blind and print disabled is quite recent, for example. In Canada we have had fair dealing rights roughly equivalent to the US' for only a couple of years. As I learned last summer at the IFLA Copyright & Legal Matters pre conference, many countries including in the EU actually do not have anything like the fair dealing / fair use rights we enjoy here. Recently, copyright has become the subject of trade treaty negotiations such as TPP; these negotiations could require a large portion of the world's countries to change their copyright laws yet again, and not in the public interest. For a leak of the IP chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership, please see Wikileaks here: https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/ (As a side note, with so many of our governments espousing a commitment to open government, shouldn't we be hearing about things like this from our governments rather than Wikileaks?)

To me one of the necessary steps to the GOAL of global open access is to work towards fair and balanced copyright everywhere. In Europe, the EBLIDA (European libraries) group is doing some good work towards this end:
http://www.eblida.org/news/fair-copyright-for-all-across-europe.html

One way to think of this is that much re-use (e.g. educational use, research, copying for critique) can be covered under fair use / fair dealing, while on the other hand gains by IP rights holders extremists (such as laws making it illegal to circumvent digital locks, even if the locks are a barrier to legal use, or ever-expanding copyright terms) can result in losses for open access.

best,

Heather Morrison


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