Legal Commentary

An eminent philosopher from one of the top programs in the country wrote to me the other day with the following concern. He noted that he and countless others have given papers or presented parts of books at law faculty workshops around the country, but he was chagrined to see that various libraries, including those at Georgetown and University of Toronto, were keeping copies of those works and making them permanently available in their libraries even though that's a use or "publication" beyond the implicit license to circulate the work for a one-time audience. To be more precise:

The authors never agreed to have them distributed beyond the participants in the single event at which they were presented. The Law Faculty proceeded to distribute them to libraries without the knowledge or permission of the authors. Hence the entire series consists of bootlegged intellectual property. If you ask any of the authors, you will find that they are completely unaware that their unfinished and uncorrected manuscripts are now in the permanent collections of libraries.

I can understand why that's frustrating, especially if the manuscripts are only drafts.  Even if they were finished products, the libraries should probably be buying the final product rather than using these "bootlegged" versions without authorization. I suspect anyone aggrieved by the situation could probably inform the library in question to remove the work from the shelves, but another problem is one won't necessarily know which schools are doing this.  What do people think? Should law intrude here? Where should the burden fall here?