[od-discuss] Copyright for papers published by US or?Commonwealth employees

Tue Apr 29 11:42:12 UTC 2014

It sounds to me as though this is an oblique reference to Crown Copyright which still seems to exist in some form in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada [1].  But it’s not clear why government copyright has been singled out for special treatment.

Regards

Andrew

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright

From: od-discuss [mailto:od-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Baden Appleyard
Sent: 29 April 2014 11:56
To: Peter Murray-Rust
Cc: od-discuss at lists.okfn.org; Michelle Brook; open-access at lists.okfn.org
Subject: Re: [od-discuss] Copyright for papers published by US or Commonwealth employees

Hi Peter, 

A very curious notice indeed.  For what its worth, I am not aware of any Australian jurisdiction, state, territory or federal, that has ever abandoned copyright, apart from the State of New South Wales by notice in the Government Gazette, in respect of copyright in its legislation.

Kind regards

b

________________

Baden M Appleyard

National Programme Director

Australian Governments' Open Access and Licensing Framework (AusGOAL)

Mobile: +61(0)459 824 061

Linkedin: http://au.linkedin.com/in/badenappleyard

AusGOAL

Visit our Website <http://www.ausgoal.gov.au>  | Like and Share us on Facebook <http://goo.gl/lQXKsI>  | Join our LinkedIn Group <http://linkd.in/oq5L3u>  | Follow Us on Twitter: @AusGOAL <https://twitter.com/#!/AusGOAL>  | +1 on Google Plus <http://goo.gl/E8k03j> 

On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 8:44 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

[posted to Open Definition list as well since they have a lot of jurisdiction knowledge]

from a correspondent...

"I have noticed on a few ACS journal papers the following text:

Published by American Chemical Society. Copyright © American Chemical Society. However, no copyright claim is made to original U.S. Government works, or works produced by employees of any Commonwealth realm Crown government in the course of their duties. 

example :

http://nature.berkeley.edu/ahg/pubs/Chan_etal_JPCC_2014.pdf

So it sounds like that there exists no copyright, and therefore the ability to freely distribute the text for papers with this statement. The odd thing is the inclusion of the Commonwealth in this. Am I interpreting things correctly? 

Does this include any government worker in the list of authors? For example where you have one government employee and four commercial sector. Are university employees government, etc?"

PMR: I think this is true for US. I'd welcome the interpretation of "Commonwealth" - is this British Commonwealth? Commonwealth of Australia? Canada? or all common wealths? and does it apply to (say) Germany? Max Planck?

It would be very useful to have a list of territories where this was in force

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069 <tel:%2B44-1223-763069>  

_______________________________________________
od-discuss mailing list
od-discuss at lists.okfn.org
https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/od-discuss
Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/od-discuss

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/od-discuss/attachments/20140429/cca67292/attachment-0003.html>