> On Thu, 24 May 2007, Bebbington Laurence wrote:
> > This would, I think, prevent an author=20
> > who has assigned copyright from making or authorising the copying=20
> > and sending of an item to someone IF the intended use is for=20
> > commercial purposes (e.g. an author, who is not the copyright=20
> > owner, could not send the published version to someone working in=20
> > a pharmaceutical company's research laboratory). However, arcane=20
> > this may seem, it is (in my view) the legal position.
Stevan Harnad replied:
> It is indeed arcane and seems to have nothing to do with the topic at
> hand (and the rationale for Open Access), which is individual research
> use for research purposes.
Bebbington Lawrence is indeed misinterpreting the phrase "commercial purposes" here. The "commercial purposes" referred to in the copyright act are the commercial exploitation of the copyright work, not the ideas embodied in it. So, a researcher working for a commercial company rather than a non-profit university has exactly the same rights to private research copying as does an academic at a university. The "commercial" element means that you cannot make individual copies of an article and send them to others. You may, however, make a single copy of an article in order to provide someone else with it for their private research - i.e. reading the article.
What the receiver then does with the information they gain from the article is entirely outside copyright law, so long as they do not violate the rights to produce derivative works nor sell copies of the article to others.
(Side note: this is also a common misunderstanding of the "non-commercial" distribution licences provided by Creative Commons. For example, the lecture notes and podcasts that I release under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license may be used by commercial training providers. They may not charge a fee for access to materials derived from my notes/podcasts, but they may charge a fee for training sessions in which they use my notes as AV aids in teaching. It's the commercial distribution of the copyright material which is not licensed, not the use in other commercial transactions that is prohibited.)
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*E-mail*a.a.adams_at_rdg.ac.uk******** Dr Andrew A Adams
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Received on Sat May 26 2007 - 11:59:01 BST