Slashdot Mirror
Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright
word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."
Nelson says: "Haaah-haaaaah!"
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
"(We're) ABOVE THE LAW!"
From the article:
"They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it."
If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?
they totally got pwn'd on this one.
The game.
Oh, and by the way, make sure you cut a check to every taxpayer who funded it in the first place...
Just not when *you* do it.
The only silver lining on people like this is that they, like the nazis, are too stupid to prevail in the long run. (Did I set a record for Godwins Law ?)
How do the hell do you know for certain that site didn't violate copyright by paying Getty Images for use of the images while still keeping the watermark?
As far as I can see, just the appearance of the watermark isn't a certain indicator that their copyright was being violated at all. Did anybody ask Getty?
I love how slashdot posts some blog entry and states definitely that this was copyright violation. If only they were this hard on people and sites who you know, pirate movies,music and games.
Those in glass houses shouldn't throw someone else's copyrighted stones.
just goes to show how stupid copyright law is in its current state. tax payers fund the research, researchers pay to have it submitted/access to journals and then pay again if anyone wants to actually see any of the research that was done. that is utter bs, there isnt a reason for them to charge as much as they do [the university I go to has had to shell out who knows how many thousands for this very reason] hell half the research papers are 20-40 $ unless you get an unlimited account with those crooks.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Universities have very nice internet connections, and hosting PDFs is trivial. Your days are numbered.
Nothing to see here. Especially that Getty watermark in the hair of that guy in the lab coat in doc_image.jpg. And definitely not the Corbis watermark in the left-hand skull/shoulder X-Ray picture in header.jpg. Or the one that looks like some sort of text on the shoulder (and the hair, and the shelf all the way to his elbow) of the guy in the library in header.jpg that I can't quite make it out yet, but I'm sure someone else on Slashdot will. Umm, I mean, "Move along."
It's A-OK if it ain't the DMCA.
I did a lookup on Getty myself and discovered that the image on the first page, #AA011147, is marked as RF: royalty-free. So, actually, the copyright advocacy group in question has full rights to publish that image. I've used Getty for years, and their usage agreement for low-res images is very liberal; hence their popularity among designers.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
that when these transgressions are pointed out to them, they'll probably pay for license to use the images. When Joe Average infringes, most of the time it's deliberate, and he has no intention to pay.
I know I don't have proof to back either of these statements, but I suspect they ring true to those of us willing to be honest about our motivations.
"Oh no... he found the
http://www.prismcoalition.org.nyud.net/index.htm
It's been 10 seconds since you hit 'reply'.
I notice a lot of comments pointing out, reasonably, that since we the taxpayers have already payed for research, we should not be expected to pay for it again to the benefit of a few businessmen with a special interest.
The concept makes sense...to most of us, at any rate.
The U.S. Government, however, disagrees.
Soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
The undergrads aren't paid at all, and in almost all labs part of that money is going to "the one guy who sat on his fat butt with 3 letters after his name". Incidentally, in our lab, some undergrads are paid and other undergrads do work for research/thesis credits. The guy with the 3 letters after his name does an awful lot of work himself. All joking aside, I'm pretty sure that's the norm.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I encourage everyone on slashdot to drop them a note condemning copyright violations such as the apparent ones that are on the prism website.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Troll me down again, but while I may disagree with many slash dotters about when something should be publicly funded, this 2nd amendment purist, capitalist, right wingnut is honored to stand with the most radical left wing, nationalize everything liberal when something is publicly funded. All federal research, federally funded research, should be in the public domain and for any use by US citizens, and by extension, the world. Most of us who are interested in this data would just as soon be able to get loads of open data anyway. That includes all NASA research, images, all government data, census, geographical, geological, or any other sort of non-classified data that the government might collect or generate as part of its ongoing operation.
It's our data.
This is my sig.
So some stupid web designer put some images on the site he was hired to make, that means the whole organization is hypocritical?
Not to defend their movement or anything, but assuming the site wasnt made in-house by an "IP believer", the situation is ironic, not hypocritical.
What is this, Digg? This prism group is battling against the govt. demanding copyright for research which they have funded. Whatever you feel about the issue, it has nothing to do with copyright enforcement, but instead copyright ownership.
Among other things, the watermarked image just looks cheap and ugly.
That sounds like a great idea butt muncher. Than all research articles can be as suspect as everything else on the internet. If a researcher does not own the copyright to his own writing, he cannot submit it to a peer reviewed journal for publication.
ever hear of it?
I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention". Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics, but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free, and them charge federal government for those same articles? Measures to ensure that the feds can download and copy those articles for free is "interfering"? Oh boy!
How about some proper negotiation with those publishers about copyrights? How about setting up all-electronic Open Source journals that offer access free of charge, and let commercial publishers compete with the Open Source journals for articles they want to publish? Or is that "compromising the viability" of the commercial offerings?
Yes ... on the subject of "compromising the viability". Joe Sixpack might not recognise this statement for the fallacy it is. Research is carried out (often funded by federal government), and written of for free by the researchers who did it. Peer review of scientific articles is carried out for free by scientists in their field. Those are the "peers" that conduct peer-review. And they are *not* funded by the publishers, the are funded by their respective employers (universities, companies), and by the individual researchers themselves, who will often spend their own time reviewing papers..
Now it's widely known that todays science publishing is big business (commercial science publishers post excellent earnings every year) and scientific journals are terribly expensive (just ask any university library near you).
The fun part is that commercial publishers really do very little for the journals they publish. Just consider:
- the raw material is delivered to them in the electronic format of their choice, free of charge
- they must then employ a qualified editor who does the first crude selection. (This individual will have to be paid be paid a good salary, say $60k - $80k a year.)
- then they send the articles to individual researchers for peer-review. This takes a few hours of secretarial support, a rolodex, and an email account.
- then they read the comments from the peer reviewers that help them decide whether the article is publishable, and they route the comments to the authors for improvement and response
- finally they receive the amended article, in electronic form, do a final check, and have it typeset.
That's all. The little secret is that commercial publishers don't really add that much of value. But a library subscription can easily come to $8,000 - $12,000 per year. How many of them would you need to cover your costs? Publishers don't let on obviously, but a fair guess is that $200,000 annually will be enough to keep a journal running. That would be, say 40 subscriptions of $5
I'd like to see Universities who let their researchers give away their copyright to private publishers (like Springer) lose their public funding. The fees these private publishers charge are just way too much: usually more than a book, and they didn't even write the stuff.
Like taking someone out on a first date, only to have them hump another diner in the toilet who slips them US$40. Is that Ivy League?
> So some stupid web designer put some images on the site he was hired to make, that means the whole organization is hypocritical?
If you push for stronger copyright laws when you can't manage to follow the ones we have now, isn't that pretty bad? It'd be like someone campaigning for lower speed limits being caught doing 15+ over.
Anyhow, I'm not sure that one moral failure makes one a hypocrite, or you'd have to be amoral not to be a hypocrite. Still, it calls into question just why we need to extend copyright laws any further when no one can follow the laws we have now.
Journals provide peer review. This is not paid for by govt. grant money. Do you really want to go to a govt. database with tons of unreviewed research and try to figure out what is good and what is bs?
Peer reviewed journals generally make you sign over your copyright to them. How can you do that if the govt. owns the copyright? Most peer reviewed journals are not funded by the govt. They are generally paid for by members, subscribers, and authors.
You can see written reports and abstracts. You can see data. Once the research is done somebody still has to tabulate data and write it all up. They like to eat too.
That's not to say that journal subscriptions that cost thousands of dollars a year in order to help so-called experts keep their monopoly on knowledge aren't a sham. All the same, people should be paid for their labor.
Will you please just shut your fucking hole already.
I take a hard line on this one. If a university accepts one dime of public funding, then any and all research it does must be public domain, peioid. No exceptions, no "well, this was privately funded", no nothing. We need a really good bright-line rule regarding public research spending.
It might be that it differs by field and by journal (I'm in engineering / maths), and I'm sure that e.g. Nature doesn't demand fees to publish.
Godwin's Law means you lose the argument, so why intentionally try to invoke it unless it is an underhanded move to make their argument look better by any means necessary?
The only way you could defend this hypocrisy is to poorly argue against it, and invoke Godwin's Law.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research."
This is a complete lie. Currently, researchers own the copyright to their own writing. This organization is trying to prevent legislation from being passed that takes away the researchers copyright to his/her own research, and gives it to the govt., if the research is govt. funded. So this group isn't trying to change anything. They are trying to keep things the way they are. Changing things may have drastic consequences given the way research is perr reviewed in the US and worldwide.
On second thought, and when I look closer, I see that they are good-quality photographs that weren't taken as an afterthought with someone's mobile phone. So you're right ... someone had to go and take them, and that someone had to be paid out of the licensing fees. Point taken.
I'm in the humanities so things may be different in the hard sciences.
In order to get your article published you have to subscribe to the journal and in most cases the society that the produces the journal. When you get published you don't get paid and the publishers take the copyright. Because they take the copyright when you want to revise the paper, turn it into a book, or even pass it out to use in your own class you have to get permission. Now they always give permission but they are under no legal obligation to do so. They own the article outright.
Then the journals turn around and sell access to their articles to a database company like ebsco or someone else. That database company then charges universities for access to those articles.
As academics part of what we get paid for is to publish. So the university pays us to publish and then turns around and has pay someone else to get access to those very same articles that they paid to have written in the first place. Sure they get access to lots of other articles written by people from other universities but the fact is they are paying twice for these articles. I'm sure there are lots of other businesses that wish they had the same business model.
To top it off, as I said earlier, a lot of these journals are the official publications of academic societies. These societies are organized by academics in the field for academics in that field. It is supposed to help with the advancement and promotion of that area of study. So why are they taking the copyrights of their members? Sadly, most academics don't know or care about intellectual property and so the few times I've asked that very question I've been met with "I don't know" or the editor of the journal trying to defend profiting off our backs.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
When I went to the site, I didn't see any watermarks in the images, which indicated to me that the Prism Coalition had fixed the problem, either by acquiring the images through the proper channels or by painstakingly editing the photos.
Then I went to the Google cache of http://www.prismcoalition.org/. The bar at the top says that the cache was made on August 23, four days before the blog post from the summary. There are not any watermarks in the Google cache. If the cache is accurate and accurately dated, then the watermarks were added and then removed sometime in the last four days. That is, if they ever were there at all.
Something fishy is going on here. In addition to the fishiness that was the original topic of discussion, I mean.
This space reserved for administrative use.
It's possible that they DID have permission to use those images, and that they simply displayed the watermarked ones by mistake. That's an awfully serious charge you guys are throwing around without evidence.
So how did they suddenly become a posterchild for copyright laws on slashdot? A bit desperate for news, are we?
Peer reviewers work for free (yes, I am one--hence posting A.C.). The authors are not paid, and will even be billed "page fees" if the paper runs long. The symposium paper authors likewise are not paid, they don't even get out of paying symposium registration fees to present the papers they weren't paid for writing (with the exception of certain privileged authors of "invited papers"). The publisher's policy is that authors turn over all copyrights to them, gratis. The majority of the papers contain so little original content--cynically referred to as the Least Publishable Unit--that they are a waste of paper. We pay high prices to get our journals. We bear high symposium fees to hear the talks. We endure this because perhaps 10% of the content has actual merit, and we need that 10%. The rest should never have been printed, but other reviewers are too dependent on meeting publish-or-perish quotas to buck the status quo and give a BS paper the review it deserves.
The captcha is "incense". It should have a "d" at the end!
PRISM claims that free publication of science reports on the Web will undermine peer review.
--
make install -not war
You know, I might actually RTFA this time. Well, not to read it, per se; more just to increment their hit counter to make the pain all that little bit worse when Getty sues for damages.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
It's worse than that. They'll issue a big press release saying "See, we're a copyright advocacy group, and we screwed up -- that's how tough it is!". Then they'll spend a bunch of money on a complete internal audit, and highly publicize what great lengths they're going to fix their website.
Then they'll attach like a leach to the CEOs of other companies and say "You don't want to get caught with your pants down like we did, do you? You need a complete internal audit!".
My guess is that most people who claim to believe in strong copyrights are violating copyright. It's tough not to at some point: ever made a mix tape? Played music where lots of people could hear it? Photocopied a bit of a magazine or book? Used an image on your desktop or website when you weren't clear on the source? All questionable actions in a strong copyright world.
Ah well... people are pretty comfortable with hypocrisy. Never stopped anyone from badmouthing pornography either.
Cheers.
After reading through the comments on this story, it appears to me that there is significant confusion over what exactly Open Access means and how the peer-review process is handled. I have published quite a few paper in Open Access journales (BMC Genomics, Genome Biology, Nucleic Acids Research to name a few), and this is how it works:
*) One of the key differences between publishing in a traditional journal vs. an Open Access journal is that the final publication is freely available for all in PDF format from the publishers website following publication. The peer-review process is exactly the same as with traditional journal - as somebody else have already mentioned in this thread. Peer-reviewing is NOT something you are paid to do - is is solely based on volunteers (who are expects within the relevant field of research).
*) With Open Access journals you pay to have the publication "printed" (only if it get accepted through the peer-review process). This fee covers the expenses of editing and administration that traditional journal covers through their subscription fees.
*) Almost everybody searches for research papers on-line these days - either through Google or searching a specialized database like MedLine/PubMed. For Open Access journals the scientific publication will be directly available for download in PDF format - for traditional journals a PDF file will also most likely be generated - but it will only be available to subscribers (usually the University Library).
I hope this clears up a few things.
-Rasmus
In the CS field, it is the convention that if the paper is sufficiently different, then
the revision can be published separately. I have been guest editor of three journal
special issues related to conferences. We require that there be at least 30% new material
in the revised papers from the papers in the conference, and the referees for the revised
papers are asked to comment on how different the extended paper is. To the best
of my knowledge it has not been tested in court, but it is the accepted practice.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
they "created" rules so complicated they can't grasp their meaning themselves any more. i wonder if the whole law-system one day will implode and leave a black thought-hole.
By the time I read the article and looked at Prism's website, they had already replaced (doctored?) the images. Any chance of using this utility to find out whether they foolishly just doctored out the watermarks?
3 7208.shtml
Forensic Analysis Reveals Al-Qaeda's Image Doctoring
http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/07/08/03/12
Who'da thought? These are people whose purpose is to corral taxpayer-funded projects and hold them in order to extort money from the public that paid for them in the first place. These are the same people who send mercenaries into other people's homes to seize their property based on "laws" obtained through bribery, and then harass and intimidate them with their lawyer-mercenaries. Oh, and then they manage to popularize the meme that their victims are the "pirates". So this story is basically like reporting that a squirrel ate a walnut.
Looks like they've bought the images in question. Current front page has great big "copyright xxx" on all three pics. Guess Prism's out a few bucks.... And probably a couple of web designers are out of a job. That's life.
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