[DIYbio] legality of distributing pdfs or hard copy papers?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Avery louie wrote:
> What is the deal with printing or distributing electronic copies of papers
> that are obtained from school (university) subscriptions to journals?  I
> could be a source of these things for my group, but I don't want to have to
> foot the bill for any copyright charges.

Manuscripts published in the United States prior to 1923 are in the
public domain, so those can be shared without wondering. Also, in the
past 10 years there has been the growing trend of publications
licensed permissively with a choice license from Creative Commons.
These tend to be very explicitly okay with all sorts of sharing and
remixing.

Most publishers will send you a notification (or even a DMCA takedown
request) if they think you are infringing on their rights. That's a
good time to talk with them to work out how they believe you are
infringing, and how the situation could be resolved to mutual
satisfaction.

Honestly, if you are worried about a publisher tracking you down for
partaking in science, then I would (with bias) recommend pdfparanoia
to strip out watermarks:
https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia

IIRC, you sometimes have people pay to attend BOSSlab ? I would be
cautious about distributing papers in that context. You have to be
especially vigilant in situations where money is changing hands. I
think publishers use sites like copyright.com to calculate how much
you owe them per distribution in a commercial/business/non-profit
context.

I am not entirely sure about what goes down if you are an unaffiliated
individual. It would be a huge violation of the trust that science has
placed in publishers if they were to go around suing readers for
reading science.

IANAL. No implied warranty or implied fitness for a particular purpose.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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