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."

Comments

didn't we already pay?

[Spacepup]

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?

Re:didn't we already pay?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, too bad for you and your company. Don't expect to take public money and turn it into to your own corporate profits.

End of story. Spare me the "but some was private and some was...", blah, blah, blah, crap. Your company held out its greedy little hands to take OUR tax dollars. Any knowledge gained from public money must be given back to the public. Period. No jumping through hoops or other fancy legal crap to keep from returning the publics ROI. We want our dollars back with interest or with gained public knowledge.

Re:didn't we already pay?

[kebes]

Sure, publicly-funded research builds on privately-funded research, and vice versa. Sure, labs will sometimes receive a mixture of funding, receiving university funds (which derive from tuition), government funds (which derive from taxes), and corporate money (which derive from economic activity). But, you're mixing up the "corporate funding" with "corporate publishers." The two groups are totally distinct.

The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!

Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*

The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.

(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)

In many labs

[benhocking]

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.

Re:web designer

[oliphaunt]

Someone still signed off on the site before it went live, meaning at least one marketdroid or PHB decided that it was OK to use those photos without asking where they came from. Unless the operation is totally half-assed. Which I guess is the point.

Re:web designer

[fm6]

Organizations are collectively responsible for their joint actions, even if every single member didn't sign off on the specific action. Suppose Prism persuades the administration of a University that they have to stop their faculty from "stealing IP." If the university seriously want to change its people's behavior, it implements new policies and make it very clear to the faculty that they have to follow them.

In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.

So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.