MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

["John Cox" <John.E.Cox@btinternet.com>]

Just a point of correction on Jan Velterop's posting.  Moral 
rights are provided for in the UK's Copyright Designs & Patents 
Act 1988.  Moral rights are recognized and protected throughout 
the European Union, and in other jurisdictions as well.  Moral 
rights cannot be sold or assigned by the author; he/she can only 
waive them.  So they remain with the author come what may.  The 
major gap in the recognition and protection of moral rights is 
the USA.  This has little to do with Common Law vs. Roman Law (or 
Civil Law) jurisdictions, and much more to do with the 
legislative framework in each country.

Far more important is that moral rights simply codify proper and 
professional publishing conduct, and prevents the publisher or 
another author from altering the work or pretending that it is by 
someone else. Moral rights assist in the process of countering 
plagiarism, amongst other benefits, because the author can sue 
the plagiarist for breach of moral rights.

John Cox

Managing Director
John Cox Associates Ltd
Rookwood, Bradden
TOWCESTER, Northants NN12 8ED
United Kingdom
E-mail: John.E.Cox@btinternet.com
Web: www.johncoxassociates.com

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop
Sent: 25 August 2008 02:24
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

Sandy,

It is not so much that an author retains 'value' than that it is 
a way to deal with the legal construct that copyright is. 
Copyright is granted automatically to an author. Only the 
copyright holder can license, or even assign to the public 
domain, a copyrighted work. Not attaching a CC or similar licence 
to a work always keeps it in legal limbo, as the user can never 
be sure if (the monopoly granted by) copyright will be asserted 
at any point. This may not matter much for blog postings or list 
contributions such as this, but it may matter a lot for formal 
scientific articles.

As for moral rights, they are secured in most European countries 
(i.e. the 'Roman Law' countries) as you say. However, they are 
not, as I understand it, in Common Law (mostly Anglo-Saxon and 
their ex- colonial) countries. Including the 'European' UK. As 
science and science publishing are global pursuits, we cannot 
just rely on European (Roman Law) copyright, I would have 
thought.

I may be wrong, but this is what I've always understood. (If I'm 
wrong, I hope that list members will correct me).

Jan Velterop


On 22 Aug 2008, at 23:35, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> Just curious, what exactly is the value of the copyright that the
> author retains under this CC license since users can do practically
> everything with it except remove the author's name? There is no
> residual commercial value here, is there? Under European copyright
> law, with its moral rights" provisions, "attribution" already is a
> moral right ensured by law, so there would be no need even for this
> kind of CC license, would there? One could simply grant to users
> free use of the article for any purpose with no need to protect
> attribution, since that right is inalienable in "moral rights"
> systems.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>> PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to
>> all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership
>> of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download,
>> reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS
>> journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No
>> permission is required from the authors or the publishers. Thus,
>> the contents of the seven Open Access journals of PLoS are freely
>> accessible for the reader worldwide via internet.