How To Become A Scientific Author In Poland: Delete Part Of Someone Else's Article You Think Is Wrong
from the it's-that-easy? dept
Copyrightgirl pointed us to a bizarre judgement from the Polish Supreme Court last year, which found that you can become co-author of a scientific text by deleting a few sentences that you believe to be incorrect:The defendant wrote an article about music therapy, i.e. applying music in medical treatment. Not being a physician herself, the author had requested three colleagues to verify the article and, as a result, they suggested deleting some parts, which, in their view, were not compatible with accepted medical knowledge (they were probably right, as one of the deleted sentences considered replacing anesthesia by music during surgery, which even to devoted music lovers must sound rather extreme). The defendant initially agreed to publish the article together with her – then – colleagues as co-authors, but later changed her mind. The colleagues duly sued to have their co-authorship recognised and, in the eyes of many experts surprisingly, won in all instances, including the Supreme Court.The trouble with this, of course, is that it leads to some ridiculous possibilities:
It also provokes the question whether all reviewers in scientific journals or university professors tutoring students, who certainly quite often (rightly or wrongly) consider certain parts of the reviewed works inaccurate or incorrect and have them deleted should not be regarded co-authors (if so, this would probably have to be the case with all university professors guiding their students through a thesis!).It will be interesting to see what kind of cases try to build on this decision.
Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: co-authors, editing, poland
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Winning with Stupidity
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Winning with Stupidity
I would like to claim co-authorship on this and any new post deriving from it
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9suaVDI0Jw
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
At a glance this judgement doesn't seem that bad but at a closer look it really does feel like it covers way more cases than it should.
What I am more interested about on this topic though is that the author promised to publish the article together with the others. If they were helping with the paper because they had been promised co-authorship and otherwise would not previewed and offered insights on it I can't help but wonder if the one to blame in this specific case was the author herself.
I am not that fluent in legalese and I'm very much not up-to-date on polish laws but I feel that the outcome of the court case is right but that the stated reason for the judgement is wrong.
I would be interested in reading the court decision in full myself but my polish is a bit rusty, I doubt that it gives a blanket permission to just delete something from another work and claim co-authorship like the title implies. The implications for a student-professor interactions during the course of writing a thesis is however worrying but without reading the whole court decision it's hard to know how it will turn out.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
I don't see this as a copyright issue, so much as a contract issue.
While some lawyer might try to use this as grounds for some other cases, I doubt they would get much traction. If you ask someone to edit your paper and offer them a credit on the paper, and then say oh I was kidding I expect them to sue you.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
BTW, the Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president and approved by the parliament.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
(i) only from the candidates proposed by National Court Council (Krajowa Rada Sądownictwa),
(ii) nobody -- neither any legislative body nor anyone else -- approves the President's decision.
I cannot locate the ruling but perhaps it was based on the derivative work conception, which -- particularly if the Very-Scientific-Paper is edited -- may lead to such a conclusion.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
What if you're singer/songwriter trying out a new song to an audience and someone yells out, "The song is great, but cut out the guitar solo." So you record it without the guitar solo.
Does that mean that the random guy should get partial copyright credit for the song?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
My wife once wrote a fiction story about a boxer (one who engages in the sport of boxing) and spent a lot of effort reading up about boxing and running around interviewing people in the business. And of course many people (including me) were asked to read and critique.
Should she have named every one of those people as co-author? No. That's what the acknowledgements section is for. Not one of them penned a single word. She's the one who actually did the work writing the story.
(She never published, so don't bother looking. You will find authors with my last name, they're not related or are very distant relatives.)
However, I agree with other comments that if the author agreed to co-authorship in a contract, he was obligated.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Those ridiculous situations only arise when you try to own ideas without that dysfunctional concept there would be no problem as the other guy could use the same things and create his own version of it.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Co-authorship
BUT, in the US, asking an expert for help does NOT make the expert a co-inventor, and while not clearly defined in the law, I believe an argument to that precedent would prevail as to authorship, etc. IN THE US, that is.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Accounting
For example, if you deleted 58 words, you get copyright over a phrase of negative fifty-eight words. Fair use would allow me to add back in say 10-15 of those words.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]