[pbhjpbhj]

If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub.

If we're going to allow authors to do that then we could reduce the workload by uploading all the papers to central servers, like some sort of hub, and just letting people download them.

The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright. Also USA exporting ever longer copyright terms.

Limit what counts as an artistic work (or what counts asa derivative, extracting data is not artistically derivative).

Limit period of copyright to 20y like for patents.

Bosh.

Entirely my own personal opinions.

[ericpauley]

While the facts presented in a scientific paper may not be copyrighted, the actual form and content of the paper clearly is, both common-sense and legally. Papers contain prose, artistic representations (figures), potentially photographs, and other stylistic elements that are clearly copyrightable.

Whether works funded by government dollars should be copyrightable is of course a different question.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Papers contain prose, artistic representations (figures), potentially photographs, and other stylistic elements that are clearly copyrightable. //

In copyright there is already a concept (in UK caselaw at the very least) that things that can only be presented in a limited way are effectively not artistic enough to gain copyright. A scientific paper can have artistic prose and such, but the purpose is to make a factual presentation. I'd be happy to allow people to chose to state that their paper is not a presentation of facts, but such things should not be accepted into scientific corpus and should be excluded when considering if an author has fulfilled a contract to produce a scientific paper, or fulfilled a duty to do scientific research.

Photographs which are slavish reproductions---which a photo of apparatus needs to be in order to be scientifically useful---are not artistic works, for example. You can choose puce headings with lilac lines for your table but if it's in a scientific paper the purpose is informational [if that wasn't your purpose then you shouldn't have done it]. Coloured diagrams, sure, if they're used outside the context of the paper, and were manually manipulated, then allow them to be considered artistic works; but in the context of the paper they're presentations of supposed facts.

I don't doubt you can lawyer your way into arguing your scientific paper is a trademark, or a registered design, but it seems entirely reasonable to simply prevent such things with ab exclusion clause in the legislation like "scientific papers are not subject to IP laws and can be shared freely". Of course you need to say what a paper is (something published as if it were a paper, or submitted to a journal as it were a paper, or made available publicly as if were a paper).

[owlbite]

> If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub.

It's normally standard academic journal licensing terms that the author is permitted to distribute the work in pre-print form on a person-to-person basis.

[pbhjpbhj]

The point is though that the license is private and not available, the author might have right to publish to scihub, or scihub might have the right some other way (eg gov funding forces author to publish openly), one doesn't know either way.

[sokoloff]

> The real problem here is that scientific works are not artistic creations and shouldn't be covered by copyright

While they are perhaps not artistic creations, I see scientific papers as the creative work of one or more humans. Most computer code is not an artistic creation, but is a creative work nonetheless. My comment here is not artistic…

[pbhjpbhj]

Yeah, they're creative, agreed. Code is creative. Making a chair is creative.

Not in general artitistic though. Shoe-horning [ie forcing] computer code into the frame of copyright is also a bad move. It needs its own IPR really.

[elashri]

I would be surprised that anyone can claim a copyright violation for an author sharing his paper with someone over private communication.

[pbhjpbhj]

It's not the authors paper if a publisher produced it. That's why authors share preprints. But, I'd be surprised if that wasn't disallowed by their contracts in the UK (no point disallowing it in USA, Fair Use would allow it I feel).