[GOAL] Re: For a publisher to claim copyright, must the author sign a contract?

[Couture Marc]

Hi all,

Under the current US Copyright Act (since 1976), transfer of copyright requires a signed, written agreement:

§ 204 . Execution of transfers of copyright ownership

(a) A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html#204 (my emphasis)

But some of the articles mentioned in Thomas’ post were published before 1976, so one has to refer to the previous version of the Act (1909!), which included a similar provision:

SEC. 42. That copyright secured under this or previous Acts of the United States may be assigned, granted or mortgaged by an instrument in writing signed by the proprietor of the copyright...

http://copyright.gov/history/1909act.pdf (my emphasis)

Furthermore, at that time, transfer agreements (as well as initial copyright) had to be registered to be valid.

I could add that the same applies in other jurisdictions (Canada, for instance).

Marc Couture


De : goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] De la part de Walker,Thomas J
Envoyé : 19 octobre 2015 10:20
À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Objet : [GOAL] For a publisher to claim copyright, must the author sign a contract?

Annals of the Entomological Society of America is a journal, founded in 1904.  In it, I published more than 20 papers between 1957 and 2009.  In 1966, ESA began posting a copyright statement on the table of contents of each issue.  In 1978 after asking for a vote from ESA members and receiving the consent of the majority, ESA began requiring authors to sign a statement that transferred the copyright of their work to ESA. Between 1967 and 1977, I published 10 papers in the ESA Annals and signed no statements in regard to copyrights.

Early this year, the University of Florida’s institutional repository (IR at UF<http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/ir>) hired an intern to work with me to make the PDF files of my contributions to the journal literature easily available online.  At the end of the intern’s project, it turned out that ESA was the only publisher that had refused the IR’s request to post the PDFs of any  of my articles.  This included 12 items, 6 or which were in other ESA journals.  It did not include the 10 papers published in the Annals in 1967-1977, but that permission was granted only after I protested I had signed no copyright statement.  In granting the permission to post the PDFs of these papers, ESA asked that the Rights Management statement include the URL that would take the user to the free abstract of the article on the Oxford Journal’s server (for example, http://aesa.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/4/752).  You might notice that at the bottom of the page, the unaffiliated user is offered the opportunity to pay US$39.00 to view a [copy-proof] PDF of my article for 24 hours.



Under current US copyright law, does ESA have a valid claim of copyright to my 10 articles published in its Annals between 1967 and 1977?, even though I signed no copyright statement?



Should you care to view the final product of the intern’s work, it is at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/tjwbib.  For a summary of ESA’s copyright history, see its Table 2<http://ufdc.ufl.edu/l/IR00007182/00001>.

Tom

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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw at ufl.edu<mailto:tjw at ufl.edu>      Phone: 352-273-3920
Web: http://entomology.ifas.ufl.edu/walker/
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