Most discussions of copyright issues regarding web pages omit the very issue that is most important to the academic community: effective dissemination of specialized works with a minimal commercial market, i.e., nearly everything we write.
      We are happy if people photocopy our articles for their students. We are annoyed if our publishers (including some of our professional societies that discourage preprints) make it hard for people to utilize our works. We cheer when the web comes along, making specialized articles freely available worldwide, and in mere seconds.
      Yes, in the unlikely event that someone can make big money off our works, copyright may help us to get a cut of it -- but our everyday concern is with being read. We try, through our writings, to establish a small community of like-minded people, enthusiastic about the same esoteric subjects as we are. Some of those are our peers in other institutions, some are students, others are possible supporters in the general public. We want them to read what we've written, and so we want to eliminate any barriers.
      In the past, we've been hampered in this endeavor by the resources bottleneck of printing, mailing, and shelf space. Library budgets have essentially dominated the scene, severely restricting publication opportunities. Editorial boards have to winnow the submissions pile into a straightjacket, the page limit set by the subscription and advertising revenue.
      But the web changes all that. The editorial side becomes more important than ever, emphasizing the editor's traditional role of recommending the best of the new stuff, but the business side is radically minimized. The budgets for printing, postage, and maintaining subscriptions are greatly reduced, down to just the costs of creating and maintaining web pages -- and a few advertisements may cover such costs, if institutional support doesn't. Since the cost of delivering copies is dropping to insignificant levels, this stands everything on its head: when any academic-style information shorter than a book isn't free to the end user, the money is likely going to keep the traditional middlemen afloat for a little longer. But their's will be a losing battle, as it is now clear that, except for books, the formerly essential middleman aspects of academic publication will shrink as severely as the horse carriage business shrank after automobiles became popular.
      As we sign over our author's copyright to the traditional middlemen, we also limit our future ability to insure the free worldwide availability of our work via our own web pages, or via giving permission to others. Yes, you can "ask permission" (a strange inversion, given that you wrote it yourself) -- but asking permission of publishers operates on a glacial time scale, and most authors will simply eliminate copyrighted material rather than delay their own publications. Clearly, we should expand the fair use exemptions within academia, not hamstring them in the manner that the copyright debate has been tending to do. But that isn't going to happen if we continue to allow the legal agenda to be set by pay-per-view home video and the software houses. Even those who we might hope to have academic interests at heart may have other agendas: the small-print-run publishers (including most traditional journal publishers) will be the big losers as the switchover to the web occurs and, alas, some academic societies have been more concerned with protecting a subscription base than with promoting widespread availability of their members' research.
      The goal, I hope, will be clear. In essence, we need to recoup the notion of a library -- a place where anyone can go and read for free -- to encompass all of academic publication on the web.
     Feel free to copy this.

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William H. Calvin is a theoretical neurophysiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of nine books, the latest being The Cerebral Code (MIT Press, 1996). His web pages start at http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin or www.WilliamCalvin.com.