Pull quote: “We see this sense of panic manifest in several ways. When Oxford University Press tries to claim that essays written for edited volumes are ‘work made for hire,’ they are grasping at a legal straw that cannot hold up for them. Likewise when publishers like Elsevier and the American Chemical Society write publication contracts that try to make authors’ retention of rights, or not, dependent on the kinds of internal policies that exist on the authors’ university campuses. Such contracts are more cries of anger and fear than legal agreements. In all of these cases, the publishers are looking for a legal lever they can push that will stave off irrelevance. But the law does not work that way in general, and copyright is written to benefit authors and give them control over their works, not to prop up a particular business model.”
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