Harvard Law Professor Steven Shavell has a new paper that “explains why abolishing copyright for academic publications is a good idea — and why the open access movement that seeks a similar goal is unlikely to succeed.”
You can download (and comment on) the paper here. From the abstract:
The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the ‘open access’ movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
Via Mike Masnick who notes that the current system “leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That’s bad for everyone.”
In other copyright craziness, ASCAP has declared a telephone’s ringtones to be a public performance in order to collect extra royalty payments:
But that is just the beginning, and part of an extreme definitional stretch that betrays some desperation. According to court documents obtained by Digital Music News, ASCAP is attempting (again) to have a discrete download counted as a public performance. That is, in addition to the mechanical royalty already paid.
Earlier, a federal judge ruled that a download does not qualify as a performance, dismissing the qualification as too “sweeping” and misplaced. But ASCAP wants to challenge that ruling, and is currently pursing the matter with the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York (ASCAP v. RealNetworks, et. al). “If not reversed, the District Court decision – abolishing the public performance right in digital music downloads – will have far reaching and unintended detrimental effects on songwriters and music publishers and their continued creation of musical works,” ASCAP appealed.