© Copyright

The copyright lawyers at ACM and IEEE, in their infinite wisdom, legally require me to inform you that these papers are copyrighted (even though no such notice is required by U.S. copyright law). That means you can't reproduce or distribute them without explicit permission of the copyright holder. Occasionally, "the copyright holder" means me, but copyrights for almost all conference and journal papers are (unfortunately) held by their publishers. Downloadable papers whose copyrights I don't hold are clearly labeled on the appropriate web page.

Take a look at the copyright transfer agreement that all ACM authors are required to sign. Almost every publisher requires a similar contract, forcing the author to relinquish, at least in principle, all rights to their own work. According to ACM, this is meant to ensure the "quality" and "integrity" of their publications, and to "protect the author's interests against plagiarism". Yeah, right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

The issue is especially frustrating in light of the growing number of volunteer- and grant-supported electronic distribution methods, which on the one hand have much lower costs than traditional paper journals (if any!), and on the other hand recognize that the purpose of scientific publication is to disseminate information, not to make a profit. Many electronic journals, such as the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics and the The Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, have much less annoying agreements. The arXiv requires no copyright transfer at all. Don't even ask me about voluntary by-page printing fees.

To their credit, ACM recently modified its copyright form to explicitly allows paper to be posted to the author's web site. For publishers that do not allow such freedom (SIAM, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier, etc.), I always modify copyright forms before I sign them, to enforce my right to post my work on the web. I also try to post papers to the arXiv before signing away my copyright---sometimes just minutes before---ensuring that commercial publishers have no rights whatsoever to arXiv versions of my papers.

I encourage you to copy and distribute any of these papers, in any medium, for any noncommercial purpose, at no charge to anyone. That's why they're here! However, if any money (beyond the actual cost of reproduction) is going to change hands, you need permission first.

The Fair Use clauses of United States copyright law explicitly allow you to make personal copies of any copyrighted work for research or teaching use, including multiple copies for classroom use. You'll probably have to make your own copies, unless you want to pay exhorbitant copyright clearance fees, typically 50 cents per page, but sometimes as high as $35 for a single four-page article. Even though at least one version of the infamous Kinko's ruling was overturned in 1995, copy shops are understandably paranoid about copyright lawsuits. In particular, ACM requires payment for commercial manufacture of coursepacks (e.g., by Kinko's); their policies say nothing about noncommercial manufacture (e.g., by you).

For more information/propaganda about copyright issues, see the Association of Research Libraries' Copyright and Intellectual Property site and their "Subversive" Proposal for Electronic Publishing, as well as the white paper "Who Should Own Scientific Papers?" by Steven Bachrach et al.

It could be worse. It could be the music industry.

Links

Federal agencies that fund research should recommend (or even require) as a condition of funding that the copyrights of articles or other works describing research that has been supported by those agencies remain with the author.

- Steven Bachrach et al.
"Who Should Own Scientific Papers?"

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work. . . . This result is neither unfair nor unfortunate. It is the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.

- Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.
499 U.S. 340, at 349, 1991

At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.

Only one thing is impossible for God:
to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

- Mark Twain
(Thanks/apologies to Godfried Toussaint)

Publications - Jeff Erickson (jeffe@cs.uiuc.edu) 22 Mar 2004