Harper's OA & Copyright Presentation

[richards1000@comcast.net]

Listmembers may be interested in Georgia Harper's presentation on 
copyright and open access at ALA Midwinter last week: "OA, IRs 
and IP: Open Access, Digital Copyright and Marketplace 
Competition," paper at 
http://wikis.ala.org/midwinter2009/images/5/5e/Harper_G_MW09handout.pdf 
, and slides at 
http://wikis.ala.org/midwinter2009/images/0/05/Thu_Harper_2.pdf .

Here is the abstract:

The fundamental concerns about intellectual property for open 
access institutional repositories are not about who owns what 
rights, or who can do what with them, or what you have to require 
contributors to give your institution to be sure you've got the 
rights you need to provide open access to their works. Those 
guidelines are readily devised and applied. The copyright 
conundrum created by open access is more basic than this: Is it 
appropriate, is it even necessary, and certainly, is it the best 
way going forward, to artificially make our works difficult to 
find and access and saddle them with high prices in an era when 
people all over the world could quickly know about our current 
research results through the Web for no more than the cost to 
them of their own infrastructure to find and read our works?

For more than 200 years copyright law has enabled, and scholars 
and their publishers have depended on, the mechanism of 
state-granted monopoly, "creating artificial scarcity" to give 
publishers a period of time during which they can charge higher 
prices than the market would otherwise dictate and recover their 
costs of publishing plus a profit in most cases. But today we 
have instant access to digital creative works, and easy, 
world-wide distribution for almost no cost for the reader beyond 
the cost of computers, internet access and electricity.

In this world, the monopolistic mechanism of "artificial 
scarcity" turns what is one of the most important, most critical 
advantages of the digital world into something to be fought tooth 
and nail. The solution isn't stronger and longer copyrights. It 
more likely will emerge from massive experimentation to find 
satisfactory business models that can fund the creation of works, 
still a costly undertaking, without sacrificing the digital 
benefit of relatively free distribution to anyone and everyone 
who might desire to access our works.

Everyone in this room probably knows this. But what we may not 
realize is the magnitude of the experiment and what it also tests 
-- that if in fact it is not just possible but profitable to 
create and disseminate digital research results (or any creative 
digital work for that matter) without relying on the copyright 
monopoly, and if the social costs of monopoly begin to outweigh 
its public benefits in the coming world of ubiquitous 
repositories adding to ubiquitous Web content, all providing 
ubiquitous open access, the experiment tests the validity of the 
fundamental assumption underlying copyright, that monopoly is the 
only way (or even the best way) to achieve optimal production of 
most creative works.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Philadelphia, PA
richards1000@comcast.net
* Member New York bar, retired status.
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