International Law

Otto?s Numbers

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

Otto Waalkes is a famous German author, musician and filmmaker. In the preface to one of his books I read a couple of decades ago, he mentioned that he takes special pride in the page numbers, since it is very difficult to think of so many different ones.

I remembered that when reading the definition of “extrinsic” work in the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” proposed by John Conyers. That reads, in part:

“(ii) represents, reflects, or results from a meaningful added value or process contributed by one or more other entities, other than a Federal agency, that are not a party to the funding agreement or acting on behalf of such a party.”

This bill would prevent Federal agencies from requiring Open Access, if the work in question is “extrinsic”. One example would be two authors working together, with only one of them receiving federal funding. One other would be that there is only one federally funded author, but his publisher adds “meaningful value”.

That is were Otto’s numbers come in. It would not be “meaningful added value” for the publisher just to add page numbers.

Actually, German publishers have taken the contrary position when discussing copyright in reporting of court cases. When Axel Tschentscher started publishing German cases on the Internet, some of the traditional print publishers asserted a copyright on the page numbers they added.

But if you take the definition at its face value, there needs to be a “meaningful added value” for the bill to kick in. It might be open to debate what that is. But if there is more than page numbers involved, all the bill does is prohibit Federal agencies from requiring Open Access of value they have not funded. I have no problem with that.

This bill is not about publishers prohibiting the business model of Open Access journals, as Peter Suber has pointed out. It is the other way round. The opponents of the bill want to prohibit traditional publishing.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on March 15, 2009 (boomark / email).