Copyright Protection paper

["Sally Morris" <sec-gen@alpsp.org>]

I do have some comments on your draft paper at 
http://publish.uwo.ca/~strosow/Sabo_Bill_Paper.pdf.

I think it contains some fundamental misunderstandings and unsupported 
assertions:

1)    Most important -  The expected effect of the Sabo bill, if 
passed. I don't see why it would be any different from the existing 
effect of the public domain status of Government works.  It would be 
valuable to look at the extent to which the public availability of 
these (for example, when published as journal articles) differs in 
reality from that of articles which are not in the public domain.  
Unless someone looks at this and sees a beneficial difference, I can't 
see what Sabo would actually achieve.

2)    The restricting effect of copyright transfer from author to 
publisher (or indeed anyone else);  not borne out by the facts! 
Copyright ownership really isn't the point - a great many publishers 
commercial as well as not-for-profit) deal with journal authors under 
the terms of agreements which allow the authors to make their articles 
freely available on their own, institutional or subject websites; see 
our recent report, Scholarly Publishing Practice at 
<http://www.alpsp.org/news/sppsummary0603.pdf> - the survey covered 
every major publisher and a fair slice of the small and medium ones 
too.  What is important is not whose name appears on the copyright 
line - this is largely irrelevant - but what rights are held by whom.  
Copyright is not really a single right - it is divisible and this is 
often the most workable approach.  See www.surf.nl/copyright for many 
examples of enlightened publisher policies

3)    The extent to which DRM technologies actually restrict Fair 
Use/Fair Dealing rights;  many people allege this, but where are the 
facts?  Again, our survey shows the considerable extent to which 
publishers actually permit things like course pack use and inter-
library loan with their electronic journals.  In any case, Fair 
Use/Fair Dealing, in the physical world, permits certain acts with 
publications to which you already have legitimate access.  It's the 
same in the digital world - these rights do not and should not permit 
anyone to access anything for 'Fair Use/Dealing' purposes;  you might 
as well say it's all right to steal a book from a bookstore because you 
wanted to use it for such purposes, and that locking the door of the 
bookstore at night restricts your rights!

4)    The usual wild generalisation that journal prices 
are 'skyrocketing'.   Yes, average increases exceed inflation - one 
major driver of this, as everyone understands, is that journals get 
bigger as more articles are produced.   But most publishers - 
especially, but not exclusively, not-for-profits, who are a very 
important part of the picture - keep their prices modest in the first 
instance (more relevant, really, than year-on-year increases per se) 
and increase them as modestly as they can.   The development of new 
ways of selling journals to libraries - collections, consortia 
licences - has also helped to reduce the cost, and many publishers make 
their journals freely available to less developed countries.

Our organisation is not against finding new and better models for the 
ide distribution of scholarly information - quite the opposite.  But 
these developments should be based on facts - which is why we spend 
much of our resources on research.

Sally Morris
Secretary General, ALPSP