Re: second-hand ownership

[Kevin L Smith <kevin.l.smith@duke.edu>]

I don't think there is enough information here to even begin to 
answer this question.  I don't mean to be flippant, but it is not 
even certain what "Newton" we are talking about.  Assuming it is 
Sir Isaac, who was a British subject and who died in 1727, there 
are many sets of circumstances in which there would be no 
copyright persisting in the work.  But we would need to know if 
the work from which you took the material was published or 
unpublished and, if the former, when and where it was published.

Another question is what you understood that you were paying for. 
It seems unlikely that you were actually paying a copyright 
permission fee; there may well be no copyright and, in most 
cases, libraries do not own the copyright even where it exists. 
You may have been paying a use fee or a fee to have a copy made. 
Such fees might not have to be paid again as long as you still 
have the facsimile you took away with you and could use it again 
in a subsequent article.  If you were paying for copyright 
permission, however, that fee probably would have to be paid 
again for a different use, depending on the terms of the original 
license.

I have a hard time imagining how the publisher of the first journal
article could give or withhold permission for you to reuse this material.
Even if you transferred your complete rights in the first article to the
publisher, you can not transfer rights you do not hold.  If the library
owned a copyright to this material, which I think unlikely, your
publication of the excerpt in an article, with permission, would not
divest the owner of the rights to authorize subsequent uses.  And if the
work was not protected by copyright, publishing it in the first article
would not give that publisher any right to control the public domain
material; they could only control use of the original material for which
copyright was transferred.

I hope I haven't badly misunderstood the situation, but it is clear, at
least, that more information is needed.

Kevin L. Smith, J.D.
Scholarly Communications Officer
Perkins Library, Duke University
PO Box 90193
Durham, NC  27708
919-668-4451
kevin.l.smith@duke.edu
http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/



"Ari Belenkiy" <belenka@mail.biu.ac.il>
Sent by: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
11/14/2007 10:32 PM
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Subject: second-hand ownership

Dear list members:

I have a question on the ownership of "second-hand" artifacts.

Recently I published a paper that displayed samples of Newton's 
handwriting from Jerusalem library.  I paid for each of them in 
cash:)

Now I want to publish another paper in another journal with parts 
of the same pages displayed again.

Should I pay to the same library again (for virtually same 
pages)?

Or should I negotiate the matter with the first journal to 
dismiss charges altogether?  Or?

Ari Belenkiy