Sending a copy is legal.

But, the moment the recipient OPENS that paper, it (due to a stupid court case from a few year back) legally creates a new “copy” (on the screen, yes). At that moment, the act of sending by the sender become illegal – a new copy of the paper was made.

This is why people using #icanhazpdf are fine – nothing they do is illegal. But they should be careful about thanking the senders. There is a good reason most senders do not say anything publicly about it – they DM to get email address, then mail it, without saying anything on Twitter (and certainly not drawing even more attention to themselves by re-using the hashtag).

Of course, one reason that publishers are not going after this is that the #icanhazpdf tweet contains a link to their site. More eyes on a paper, more likely it will get read, later cited, thus adding to the IF of the journal. If the recipient uses the paper in some way – to cite in their own paper, or to write an article/post about it – this again brings attention to the paper and potentially increases the IF of the journal. So publishers tend to go only after Big-Time copyright breakers, not after single-paper exchanges.

The problem is that nobody can subscribe to all journals that might be needed for a research project. This is further exacerbated by the fact that employees of small institutions, start-up companies and individuals may not have access to libraries or inter library loan privileges as intended in copyright statements, leaving them with the choice of paying $25-50 for copyright clearance (for the article copy that must be discarded after reasonable use) or finding a friend/colleague/online source to ‘share’ the article. For most such researchers, the cost of legally gathering reference papers for even a small project is prohibitive…

Surely, publishers understand that copyright infringement is happening every day, and would prefer that it stop. Historically, scientific journal copyright violation prosecutions have been initiated against individuals and institutions – albeit not too many in the news lately – suggesting a degree of realistic tolerance. It is the unfortunate fact that producing and disseminating high quality, peer-reviewed scientific literature has a cost, whether the publication is issued on paper, online or both. Publishers have to find a way to support those costs if such publications are to continue…and scientists have to find a way to gain access to the papers they need to progress in their work. #icanhazpdf may be one solution, but it comes with the risk that publishers, and courts, may not agree that it constitutes reasonable use as defined in copyright statements.

For what it’s worth (not related to #icanhazpdf): I’m under the impression that one advocacy forum gathers research papers into an archive they have created, which they then provide to their members.

“Publishing is just like the music business” trope is so wrong, and so many times debunked, that it even made the e-Publishing Bingo card.