On Mon, 6 Aug 2007, Peter Hirtle wrote:
I for one am in agreement 100% with Sandy Thatcher on this. We
already are suffering confusion because of the ill-advised
decision to use terms like "self-archiving" and "open archive,"
both of which have nothing to do with archives or the permanent
retention of knowledge.
Both terms were perfectly fine for providing online access
(permanently, of course).
But "open archive" then went on to denote OAI-compliant and
interoperable, but not necessarily Open Access, so "Open Access"
was needed as an extra descriptor. "Repository" was (and is) of
course entirely superfluous ("archive" would have done just
fine), but now "Institutional Repository" has consolidated its
supererogatory niche, so OA IR is what we have to make do with.
Now we have proposal to use the term "fair use" in a manner
that has nothing to with either the American concept of "fair
use or the British concept of fair dealing.
The "American concept of fair use or the British concept of fair
dealing" comes from the paper era, and does not fit the online
era, especially for research. So they have to be adapted and
updated. Not the online era to the antique terminology, but the
terminology to the online era.
The adaptation needs to be natural, commonsensical and
transparent, not tortured and procrustean, attempting to
resurrect obsolete, inapplicable and incoherent usages of "fair
use" by insisting on fidelity to defunct, papyrocentric
intuitions, consigning the commonsense ones to "schmair use."
That would be pedantry, not progress.
Harnad's proposal would just further obfuscate what is meant by
both. Further, using the term suggests a specific legal basis
for the action, when in reality the actions may be authorized
by license. Schmair use it is... Peter B. Hirtle CUL
Intellectual Property Officer Technology Strategist Cornell
University
It is *fair use* -- legally as well as commonsensically -- to
email a copy of your article to an eprint requester. It is fair
use -- legally as well as commonsensically -- for the requester
to read and use that emailed copy. End of story. The rest would
just be self-imposed confusion and obfuscation. One should
update one's understanding of "fair use" rather than trying to
consign these perfectly natural, contemporary and ubiquitous
instances to "schmair use."
(By the way, I'd started calling it the "Fair Use" Button
instead of the "Eprint Request" or "Request Copy" Button,
inspired by someone else (I've forgotten who: felicitous
first-coiner please identify thyself!) to call it that, because
that made the Button's purpose and use far more transparent and
comprehensible, intuitively, and people at last understood what
the Button was really about, and for. Does anyone really imagine
that this is the time to call it the "Schmair Use" Button, out
of fealty to the Dark-Ages origins of the term "Fair Use"?)
"How the Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access Mandate + the 'Fair Use'
Button Work"
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/274-guid.html
"Get the Institutional Repository Managers Out of the Decision Loop"
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/6482.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/260-guid.html
Stevan Harnad