A lot of people I meet are curious what my job is like. In fact, a lot of my colleagues who work in the same library as me don’t know what I do with my time. So I’m going to highlight some interesting things that come up in my work. Hopefully, this may become a […]
Tag Archives: contracts
Copyright Report #12; General shenanigans
“Who’s On First?” Routine goes to the Supreme Court The heirs to Abbott & Costello recently sued a Broadway play that involves quotation of the classic “Who’s On First?” comedy routine. Court decisions so far have disagreed as to whether the quotation in the play is a fair use or not, but a more fundamental […]
Your lawyer works for you.
There are plenty of words that lawyers use frequently that are not part of normal people’s conversation. One that lawyers use a lot, but non-lawyers may not have -heard- us use, is “zealous.” It’s an ideal of the profession to provide “zealous advocacy” for clients, and in fact it is…
Contracts & Copyright
This post is spurred by a number of conversations I’ve had recently with close friends and more distant acquaintances, about use and/or publication of archival materials, and materials from subscription databases. Rick Anderson’s thoughtful “Asserting Rights We Don’t Have” post, which was published in the midst of these discussions, was…
Where copyrights come from (part I) – Copyediting does -not- create a new copyright
In US law, copyright magically comes into existence when someone creates an original work of authorship. The copyright is actually based in the original expression contained in the work, not whether there was effort involved in the work’s creation. So for the specific arrangement of words (+/- images) that make…
If takedown notices are what it took for you to -really think- about rights ownership in your publications…
Last week, Academia.edu started receiving mass takedown notices from Elsevier (an academic publisher) for papers uploaded to the site by their authors. This has come as an offensive surprise to many of the authors who received the notices, and to many other academic authors who heard about the takedown requests….
Negotiation: Getting past some of the barriers we erect for ourselves
Negotiation can look like this.Adapted from more on 360 BY-NC Esthr/Esther Dyson A lot of people I talk to are kind of reluctant to try to change any terms when they’re presented with a contract to sign in their daily lives. It’s true that a lot of the contracts…
