Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
created. Copyright gives the creator the legal right to control copying—to
prevent others from using those rights to copy, distribute, and adapt. The
copyright is an exclusive right that both creates the author's power to copy
and distribute and allows the author the power to prevent anyone else from
doing so [2].
In the life sciences, we see copyrights most clearly in the scholarly publish-
ing industry. Whether writing a journal article or a textbook, the text emerging
from biomedical research is a clear example of a copyrighted work. The impor-
tance of copyright here is primarily in the transaction between scientist and
publisher, as traditional scholarly publishers have developed business models
that depend on the transfer of copyrights from authors to journals. The jour-
nals then use the exclusive right to the articles to sell copies of the journals
and to prevent anyone from copying those journals without permission [3].
But copyrights cover far more content than the articles. Laboratory note-
books, e-mail, meeting notes, journal club reports, powerpoint presentations,
conference posters, abstracts, and more, all carry an automatic copyright, as
do many expressions of underlying data (especially data rendered in photo-
graphic or video forms).
Due to the continuing expansion of the reach and lifespan of copyright [4],
combined with the explosion of digital communications, life scientists create
copyrighted materials at a remarkable pace. Though there is tremendous
potential to publish and share these materials, the default position of copyright
makes the reuse of these materials an infringement in the absence of a
license—a positive grant of rights to users to make and distribute copies. Thus,
at the very moment we have the technical capacity to capture, store, and
publish the intermediate literature that postal delivery rendered ineffi cient
economically, the defaults of copyright make achieving that goal complex. This
default position is one that lasts a very long time.
Although copyrights are not permanent, their lifespan is tied to the date of
their creation, and after a time (defi ned by national laws and differing country
by country) the copyright expires and the underlying work passes into the
“public domain.” Copyright lasts for 50-100 years after the death of the author.
In science, that is the time difference between a world in which we have the
core theory of DNA and one in which we do not.
Copyright is subject to what is known as the “idea-expression dichotomy,”
which is a complicated way of saying that copyrights govern the expression of
an idea, not the idea itself [5]. Thus, Watson and Crick own the copyrights over
the words they chose to use to explain the structure of the DNA molecule, but
not of the idea or the facts they described. A user might come along and take
the core ideas of an article and use them without proper citation or attribution
and not infringe copyright as long as that user did not copy the actual phrasing.
The user would be a plagiarist, but that is a matter for science and not the
courts.
The author is automatically the initial owner of the copyright in an original
work of authorship as soon as the work has been fi xed in a tangible medium
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