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

Re:didn't we already pay?

[mce]

My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!

And since we were non-profit...

Re:How Do You Know??!!

[admactanium]

I was wondering this myself. I bet it's a lot cheaper to get a license for stock photos that requires you to include the credit watermarked in, instead of being able to use the photos on your own without obvious credits.

no, i buy images from getty quite often, the point of the watermark is to specifically show that the image has not been bought. who in the world would want to use a watermarked image? the extra stupid thing about it is, you can get non-watermarked low-rez getty images simply by registering for an account. that way people like me can make comps with their images without that distracting watermark. so the "designer" who did their site is not only unethical, but quite stupid as well. to top it off, they could have hidden their "borrowing" quite easily by just cropping in tighter than the watermark.

if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.