RE: Obsolete legal concepts? (RE: Fair-Use/Schmair-Use...)

["Richard Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu>]

> And the "new environment" is the PostGutenberg online 
> environment -- which is, for these authors, the OA environment.

Ah, yes -- I should have guessed that you weren't talking about 
the real-world environment of scientific publishing, but rather 
about the imaginary environment of universal OA publishing, an 
Edenic world in which authors are motivated purely by 
professional altruism and want nothing else except for their work 
to be as widely disseminated and freely available as possible.

In that imaginary world, I can see how those five legal terms 
might be moot.  Unfortunately, actual people in the real-world 
publishing environment have motivations that are somewhat more 
complex, and they demonstrate every day that universal free 
access to their work is not the most important thing to them. 
For these authors (which is to say, the great majority of 
publishing researchers), such legal terms as "copyright" and 
"copy" still retain quite a bit of significance.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Director for Scholarly Resources and Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu