It's an interesting topic, one where I will admit I am rather naive. I checked with one source of technical papers, the Elsevier website. They are an on-line sort of "clearing-house" for technical papers. They have thousands of journals, and they've got lawyers, too.
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You may print or download Content from the Site for your own personal, non-commercial, informational or scholarly use, provided that you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices.
You may not copy, display, distribute, modify, publish, reproduce, store, transmit, post, translate or create other derivative works from, or sell, rent or license all or any part of the Content, products or services obtained from the Site in any medium to anyone, except as otherwise expressly permitted under these Terms and Conditions, relevant license or subscription agreement or authorization by us.
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This means that any document that I've obtained from them, by any means, in any form, is covered by their rules, which explicitly prohibits what I just did. I expect that three are many other online services such as these with similar terms. Getting articles from the journal publishers themselves, too, is probably not different.
The article we're talking about comes from a journal called "Product Engineering" and it was printed in 1953. The journal stopped being printed in the 1960's (I think) and there are no back-issues available through Elsevier (or anywhere for that matter, I looked). So this case appears to be an exception.
To be sure, I checked that their database even does go back that far, and yes it does. Searching again among those journals from the 1950's... it doesn't come up. So if I'm going to try to hunt down the modern-day holder of the publishing rights of Product Engineering, I'm going to need a more elaborate search.
A search started at google (including google scholar), using the terms "Cozzone Melcon Hoblit" lead to a multitude of papers that reference this one, but not the article itself. Attempting the same with "product engineering" gives a result like this:
...so my guess is that there is NO current holder of the copyright to this article. It may have passed on to someone when the journal stopped publishing, but that someone has completely forgotten about it or ceased to exist.
You would have a
completely different choice if the article in question was more current. If you obtain a copy of a copyrighted article from a colleague, who got it from an official source, I believe he could be liable for copyright infringement, according to what I read in the Elsevier rules, if his copy of the document came from them.
ESP may have a good point about the sharing of the article across the US border. I didn't think of that. I can't find anything on the ".com" website that addresses this.
And all this forgoing talk concerns only
journals and the articles within them. If we were talking about something else, like corporate proprietary data, I think there are some important differences in the rules that apply.
Steven Fahey, CET
