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Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright

Posted by kdawson on from the how-to-thoroughly-discredit-yourself dept.

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."

4 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Submitter didn't do their homework by word+munger · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, royalty-free is different from free. Royalty-free means that you don't have to pay based on the number of uses of the images. It does NOT mean you get it for free.

    --
    ScienceSeeker.org
  2. Re:How Do You Know??!! by VultureMN · · Score: 5, Informative

    I work at Getty, and while I'm a code monkey and not in the biz side of it, I'm pretty sure we don't sell images w/the watermark still visible. (I've had to write code dealing with our rights-management crap, and I've never seen anything about "keeping the watermark")

    Hell, if they just wanted a legit cheap picture, they'd have gone to iStockPhoto. :)

  3. Re:didn't we already pay? by Coppit · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's the point of view that I have. I'm lucky enough to be at an institution with rather liberal IP rules (William and Mary). Larger institutions have patent foundations, which are fundamentally against the whole point of research since the patent foundation wants/claims ownership of things you discover, and would rather you didn't publish it.

    Happily, I haven't had a problem inserting "release code as open source" as a bullet in all my grant proposals. Since the grant proposal is a contract of sorts, I can point to the proposal (that the institution signed off on) if any lawyer starts hassling me about disclosing patentable discoveries.

    Note to all you folks in grad school: put everything you can, including printouts of your code, as appendices in your thesis. Your thesis is copyright you, so the institution can't keep your work (in the thesis) as their own.

  4. Re:Submitter didn't do their homework by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I worked at Getty, and use of watermarked images is prohibited. "Royalty-free" = when you license an RF image, you can use it in any application, for as long as you like, in as many different projects as you like (eg: a printed ad with 1,000,000 copies).