Pop Quiz on Copyright

"Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

Posit: You find a PDF version of the following paper delivered at a conference …

///////
Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Volume 19, Number 8 (2012), 3491-3497
Thermophilic desulfurization of dibenzothiophene and different petroleum oils by Klebsiella sp. 13T
Sumedha Bhatia (sumedha.25@gmail.com) and Durlubh K. Sharma (sharmadk@ces.iitd.ernet.in)
Center for Energy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016 India
Free Full Text Source: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r5u65r843m8l2112/
///////

Question:  Can you assume that it is OK to download the file and email it to 20 colleagues?

Answer: No.  Just because anybody else with access to the Internet could find and download the file does not mean that you have the right to redistribute it. 

Question:  But you are not trying to sell it.

Answer: Doesn’t matter.  Without written permission from the owner of the copyright, you can’t do anything except download it for personal use.

Question:  So you can send an email to the author requesting permission to distribute the file, right?

Answer: Depends.  The author may not own the copyright to his or her own article.  The copyright holder may be the journal in which the article appears, or the parent company of the journal in which it appears.

OK, that’s enough to constitute food for thought.  The point is, copyright is a very complicated issue.  It is far more complicated than it should be, as far as I am concerned, and the whole structure is so flimsy that it is teetering on the verge of collapse.  But until it actually disintegrates under its own weight, be very careful about how you use anybody else’s stuff.

Gluttons for punishment can delve deeper into copyright chaos by visiting the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/)