[Taxacom] BHL and print on demand publishers: defintion of "work"

[Curtis Clark]

Can you cite US case law? I'm not just being argumentative; I'm 
interested in the court's opinion.

On 4/2/2012 9:45 AM, Donat Agosti wrote:
>
> DA: This is not solely for the purpose of freeing these works. This is 
> a legal interpretation and not a scientists point of view.
>
> If we are scientists, and at the end even we taxonomists believe we 
> are, then we talk about testatable or refutable hypothesis. A 
> description is part of the circumscription of a hypothesis (eg the 
> species as seen in the respective publication) that has to include 
> those elements that separate it from others (diagnosis) that are 
> facts. It is not because of the creative act that you use a character 
> or another, but because of the discovery process that lead to discover 
> this fact.
>
> In fact we are to some extend automatons, part of the systems that 
> describe and redescribe the ca 1.8 million species resulting in a 
> multiple of descriptions. We even fight in this list whether peer 
> review out be part of the publishing process, especially now in the 
> age of e-publications.
>
> The role of the scientist is to discover the new species and higher 
> taxa; the description is a routine process to publish and communicate 
> the discovery. The trend today is to create character matrices and 
> ontologies, which exactly stress the point, that we believe in a 
> system that we all share, not a create process with a lot of 
> individual freedoms, and one tha allows to make comparisons over large 
> scales.
>
> We do not describe our species in terms of values such as a nice or 
> nicer, lovely species nor in poems.
>


-- 
Curtis Clark        http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark
After 2012-01-02:
Biological Sciences                   +1 909 869 4140
Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona CA 91768