Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Peter,

I have no quarrel with any part of your comment, provided we keep 
the quotation marks around "republic of scholars."  The question 
I have is, How valuable is this?  How many administrative 
requests does this save?  What dollar value would we put on these 
assertions (moral rights, "republic of scholars," etc.)?  If we 
had to pay to use CC, would we allocate funds for it?  Once we 
take CC out of the realm of the abstract and put it into the 
workaday world, its value inevitably gets compared to other 
pressing concerns.  It seems to me that CC is an expensive 
solution to a relatively small problem.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Hirtle" <pbh6@cornell.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2008 4:27 PM
Subject: Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

>I see three possible advantages to authors in using the
> Attribution license adopted by PLOS:
>
> 1.  As Sandy notes, it ensures that authors receive credit for
> their work in a nation that does not recognize moral rights.
> This is the primary advantage over dedication to the public
> domain (which itself would require a different CC license). 2.
> It simplifies for authors the process of granting rights.  Sandy
> correctly notes that "One could simply grant to users free use of
> the article for any purpose with no need to protect attribution,
> since that right is inalienable in 'moral rights' systems."  But
> how would one grant users "free use of the article"?  The CC
> license is an easy, standard way of doing so. 3.  Most of all, it
> makes it explicit that one's work is intended to be part of the
> "republic of scholars," where advances in scientific knowledge
> are freely shared for the betterment of society.
>
> Sandy, are you suggesting that the public domain dedication
> license should be used instead?  Why would the public domain be
> preferable to an attribution license?
>
> Peter
>
> Peter B. Hirtle
> CUL Intellectual Property Officer
> Scholarly Communications and Special Collections
> Cornell University Library
> Ithaca, NY  14853-5301
> peter.hirtle@cornell.edu
> http://www.copyright.cornell.edu