[TOS] Copyright assignment considered harmful?

Matthew Jadud mjadud at allegheny.edu
Sat Aug 20 13:55:40 UTC 2011


On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 09:41, Matthew Jadud <mjadud at allegheny.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 08:55, Kevin Mark <kevin.mark at verizon.net> wrote:
>> The words I've heard from various folks is the word 'pre-print' copy. There
>> seems to be some exception granted for a version of that paper that exists

Actually, I'd like to suggest that you do some more searching and
reading online before ranting and/or suggesting that it go through the
legal blog channel. For example, looking at

http://realtimerendering.com/open_access.html

this is an issue that has been discussed at some length, I suspect, in
various ACM fora. (And, perhaps, IEEE.) While it is true that being
explicitly allowed to release a published version of a paper online is
not "open access," the ACM copyright policy is friendlier than many
others in this regard -- you are allowed/encouraged to place published
versions of a work online for others to download.

I know this is not the kind of freedom that you're talking about, but
I still am of the opinion that I'd rather see an article that took the
conversation to the next step -- contacting ACM or IEEE legal, asking
what would happen if you released first under a CC license, etc., and
reporting *that* back. We know there are copyrights everywhere, and in
terms of complaint, you're roughly a decade late to the party (the NIH
and others got on this about 10+ years back, which is why we now have
PLoS and many other open access journals. First Monday may have been
one of the first open access journals, but I'm a bit vague on the
history in this space... actually, there was probably an open access
journal published in 1874 that none of us know about, but you get my
point.).

I clearly have an opinion/angle that I keep pushing, and can no longer
avoid the fact that I need to update my personal web page. Avoid
though I might, I have work to do... :P

That, and another podcast to edit...

Cheers,
M


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