Come, friends of piracy

This is a bit rich.  A network of university "research libraries" is holding "Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week" in Canada, the United States and Britain. As Hugh Stephens, the blogger (and scholar) of all things copyright, observes:

We will hear a lot about the benefits of exceptions and limitations to copyright, how permissionless use under specific circumstances promotes learning, creativity, free speech, public discourse. etc.

 All well and good. We quote at this blog, too, as you may notice. But, as Stephens goes on to observe:

What fair use and fair dealing do not justify is the wholesale appropriation of copyrighted content through industrial-scale unauthorized copying that destroys any market for the author’s works. Unfortunately, that is what is currently happening in both Canada and the US–through broad-based uncompensated educational copying in Canada and through infringing digital copying by libraries (and “pretend libraries”, like the Internet Archive) in the US, and to some extent in Canada as well.

The whole piece is well worth reading, not least to anyone concerned with academic ethics.

Image:  from Hugh Stephens's blog cited above. 

Why are university presses' contracts so bad?

The (US) Authors' Guild has some thoughts on why scholars should not assign copyright:

"When you assign copyright to publishers, you lose control over your scholarly output. Assignment of copyright ownership may limit your ability to incorporate elements into future articles and books or to use your own work in teaching at the University.” And those are by no means the only potential problems. That’s why we admonish authors never to assign a copyright to a publisher.

And yet:

The copyright grab remains endemic among university presses. To find out why, we recently canvassed several academic authors. Every form agreement that a university press had initially offered these authors contained the copyright grab clause. And yet every author we know of who requested to retain copyright was able to get the publisher to change the agreement.

So?

The problem is that most academic authors—particularly first-time authors feeling the flames of “publish or perish”—don’t even ask. They do not have agents, do not seek legal advice, and often don’t understand that publishing contracts can be modified. So they don’t ask to keep their copyrights—or for any changes at all. Many academic authors tell us they were afraid to request changes to the standard agreements.

One could add a Canadian question:  Why do Canadian academic presses want a waiver of moral rights? (Moral rights: essentially your right to be identified as the author of your work and not to have the integrity of the work tampered with.)

Update:  An object lesson on why not to yield copyright, from this blog just a couple of weeks ago 

Come, friends of piracy

Someone's promoting a free (but you need tickets) public event in Toronto soon to explain to authors how they can prosper in the new digital age.  Oddly, the event is hosted by Michael Geist, the University of Toronto, and the University of Toronto libraries, all proponents of the theory that universities have the right to appropriate authors' works -- particularly their digital works -- without payment or permission.

(When students appropriate intellectual property without permission, universities call it plagiarism and expel them. When universities appropriate intellectual property without permission, they call it "fair dealing" and build it into their budgets.)

The Toronto event is run by a branch plant of the American "Authors Alliance" a well-funded (they're hiring) group that seems entirely made up of university administrators, academic librarians, and free-copy scholars, people who have always been committed to undermining writers' ability to prosper in the new digital age.  It's troubling, though, that among those listed as attending is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis, a longtime proponent of speaking truth to power, rather than the other way round.

History is free?

At Active History, Ian Milligan salutes the new SSHRC policy requiring scholarship that it funds to be made available in open-access peer-reviewed venues within a year of first publication.

But in celebrating this good news, he ends up recycling the hackneyed old justification for open access: that if you pay for a published work by anyone who gets research support, you are "paying twice"

 in a way you’re paying twice: your tax dollars supported my work on it, and then you’re paying again.

Milligan actually knows this ain't paying for the same thing twice. In the same post, he lists all the costs that went into producing a peer-reviewed publication of a piece of his:

This charge to read the article reflects in part the work that’s gone into it: an editor, perhaps remunerated by a small stipend or course release, has shepherded it through peer review, it’s been copyedited, laid out, proofread, printed into bound copies, mailed to subscribers, and so forth (some wonder, of course, how many people buy individual copies – it’s probably also driving institutional subscriptions). I don’t disagree, and actually use this example because it’s a prime example of how the journal process improves scholarship (the final version is something I’m proud of – the draft version, not so much).  

Declaring something "open access" does not abolish these costs, Ian. Mostly it shifts them somewhere else (maybe to a different subsidizing body, but just as often from the reader to the author). Historical inquiry should be free -- but it's still free as in speech, not free as in lunch.

Schadenfreude alert: profs realize their work is threatened

With the UBC faculty association going to war with UBC over UBC’s appropriation of the intellectual property of faculty members, writer and blogger John Degen cannot help indulging in a little I told you so.

For years advocates for creators’ rights have been dismayed by the campaign that universities and departments of education have been waging against intellectual property. We have been trying to persuade academic creators they are as endangered as we are by this program of devaluing intellectual work, and predicting that their employers intend to steal from them as much as from the rest of us.

We never had much luck. In particular, CAUT, the faculty’s union, behaved like a company union on this matter, energetically shilling for the boss’s campaigns to undermine copyright, instead of defending the fundamental principles of intellectual property.

Now, with its members targeted by their employer, CAUT is actually threatening to censure UBC for implementing the copyright policies CAUT has advocated for years. I guess they never realized it might apply to them too.

(Degen, who is also executive director of the Writers' Union (where I am a member), points out the union has always defended everyone's intellectual property rights, not just those of its own members. He still thinks there would be value in a little reciprocity.

Previous coverage here.