Copyright Notices in Traditional and New Media Journals: Lies, Damned Lies, and Copyright Notices

If you were to submit an article to a journal in which you claimed that United States copyright law allows rights holders the ability to stop users from reproducing, storing, or transmitting any part of a publication in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing from the copyright holder, your article, no matter how well crafted otherwise, because of this incorrect statement, should be rejected without review. However, dozens of journals have such claims in every issue. They do so in their copyright notices in the front matter, a section that although not peer-reviewed is still part of the journal. The lack of rights spelled out in the first sentence of this paragraph is a reordering of the leading sentence for the copyright notice of the Journal of Communication, the top journal in the field of communication studies, and it is factually incorrect: U.S. copyright law, specifically fair use, states otherwise. One thought is that this is merely an unimportant piece of boilerplate text, unthinkingly placed by the publishers and written by their risk-averse lawyers. It is certainly not enforced: Academics routinely reproduce content from journal articles without permission from the publisher, and detailing the relevant literature while reproducing a quote or two for an article is a time-honored and vital part of the academic enterprise. Such intentionally inaccurate copyright notices raise many questions. One this paper seeks to explore is if these copyright notices are a factor of traditional, paper-based publishers: Do new media journals have more accurate or progressive copyright notices compared to their more traditional brethren?