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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.
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?
Those in glass houses shouldn't throw someone else's copyrighted stones.
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."
My guess would be that the point of the watermark is to shame people who are copying the image without permission.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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.
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?
Technically no, but a person who pays for a stock image and then keeps the watermark on is retarded. Thus, either they are hypocritical or they are retarded, and I try to be generous.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
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
Are we overlooking the fact that this is a "high-priced consultant" group, and "Joe Average" is, well, your average Joe? Oh, wait, I'm sorry. I forget sometimes that our government already considers corporations to be legal people. Why should this situation be any different, right?
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
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.
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 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).
The journal subscription fees, which fund the editorial staff and so forth, are paid by libraries at universities and government labs (which, again, receive money from university funds and/or government grants). So, again, a good fraction of the costs are being covered by public funds. The scientific journals could not continue operating without the money coming from public sources, so the question remains: why does the public have to pay to read material that they have already funded in other ways? You misunderstand the intentions of the open-access movement. Scientists are not asking for peer review to be eliminated. Quite the opposite: having the information more open can only enhance the amount of open criticism and discussion of science. The intention is to have journals continue to rely on volunteer reviewers, and to cover journal editorial costs using publication fees instead of subscription fees. So, instead of the public paying to read the final article, the authors would pay a charge when they are publishing, and the results become freely available.
In the end, this changes very little from the financial perspective of the scientific institutes. If journals switched to open access, then institutes would pay publication charges instead of subscription charges. The net effect would be the same for them. The upshot is that the public, and smaller research labs, have better access to scientific knowledge. In no case is peer review removed from the process.
In fact, take note that many high-impact open-access journals are starting to appear (most notably the publications of the Public Library of Science). These new journals are maintaining the rigor of the peer-reviewed scientific process.
In the end, the Journals and publishers still make money under an open access paradigm. So why do they resist it? The usual reasons: they fear change, they fear competition, and they may make less money than they are currently used to. But science will continue.
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.
[T]here are actual people in the world, who PAY for some research through their taxes, and then does not want the ownership of it through public domain.
I've read quite a number of histories of science in which the authors point out that the Western "scientific revolution" during the last few centuries has nothing to do with discovering "the scientific method". Scientific methods have been independently discovered in nearly all societies, going back into prehistory. One example I ran across recently was the comment that from what we know of their methods, the North American Indians' "medicine men" had better medicine than Europe did until sometime in the 1800s. The reason was that the medicine men actually had better scientific methodology than European doctors did. But then things changed
So what caused the big advances in Western science in the past few centuries? The historians answer to this is simple: open publication. In all other societies, such knowledge has almost always been strictly controlled by small "guilds". The knowledge was secret, and discoveries were usually not even shared with colleagues outside the discoverer's immediate circle of professionals. This meant that everything had to be rediscovered over and over again. You could only learn what your mentors knew, and you could only build on what they passed on to you, because everyone else's knowledge was unavailable to you.
But a few hundred years ago, some researchers in Europe developed a curious new approach: They published their discoveries openly, making them available for others to read, use, and build on. This led to the explosive growth of knowledge that we're familiar with.
In most of the West, such open publication is historically done only by government researchers. Before the 20th century, this meant the few idle rich such as Isaac Newton, who had brains and curiosity. So it took a while to really get going. But in the 1900s, various governments slowly got it through their thick skulls that funding research was one of the things that was building other countries' economies (and militaries), so maybe they should be funding research too. Then things really started ramping up.
But there is still one major drag on scientific advance: A lot of funding still goes into "private" (i.e., corporate) research. This is, scientifically speaking, usually a dead end, because the results of such research is kept private, and as of with the guilds of old, it isn't available for others to build on. The legal system cooperates in this, by prosecuting people who get access to private research results and try to build on it. In recent years, this has been happening more and more in the US, as the corporate world consolidates its control over the government and determines how most research is funded. Some universities also contribute to the problem, by claiming ownership of research results when they can and keeping it secret (or usable only under high license fees). I've read a few predictions that useful American research may be ending now, as the corporate world takes most of it private. And it's curious to see the publishers of scientific journals jumping in to block the advent of cheap open publication via the Internet.
Anyway, at least according to these histories, we should be supporting the open-publication people, because they're the ones pushing for more of what really made Western science the success it has been. If we really want Science to continue to improve our lives, we should be pushing for full access to all research results.
(And people have pointed out that the Internet is an example of the same phenomenon. It hasn't succeeded because it's such a great network. The IP/UDP/TCP/DNS/SMTP/HTTP/... protocols aren't all that good, actually. They're good enough to do the job, but anyone who knows them can tell you lots of ways to improve them. The reason for the Internet's success is mostly that all the specs have been published openly from the start. Anyone can download them for free, read them and implement them without legal restrictions. This gave the Internet a huge advantage over other privately-developed protocols that were often technically better but weren't available to any developer that was curious.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
Ah, I forgot: in a grant application budget you can (and should, these days) have an item for "publication cost". I.e., the money you expect to pay for publishing your results.
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 basically, the enlightenment was due to Gutenberg?
No; it didn't have a single cause. Gutenberg certainly made a major contribution and helped to enable the Enlightenment. But his technical advance potentially made publication easier and cheaper for everyone in the world, not just in Europe. The really important advance wasn't in the hardware, but rather in the "software", i.e., in the social structure that developed the concept of open publication of scientific results. This could have been done anywhere, and could have happened before Gutenberg. It happened in western Europe, whose scientists took advantage of the improved publishing technology and put it at the core of the scientific enterprise. In much of the rest of the world, publishing was (and still is) controlled by the ruling classes, i.e., by politicians, so they lagged behind Europe.
There are other social innovations that were needed. I read an interesting comment a few years back, by a French researcher who explained why he always published in English. It had nothing to do with the size of the audience. His explanation was that doing good scientific work often requires that you invent terminology, and sometimes subtle differences in terminology can be the difference between a successful hypothesis and a failure. In French, there's a national language bureau that has the legal power to decide how the French language may be used, and it's full of people with no understanding of his scientific specialty. So he can't freely invent new terminology in French and use it in his publications. Well, he sorta can, but doing so risks legal harassment and possible revisions that would destroy the scientific usefulness of his work. The English language is an insane free-for-all without any official, centrally-controlled, legally-enforced rules. So in English, he and his colleagues can work out their own terminology without any official harassment. Once they think they've got it right, they can "borrow" the terminology into French, of course, but even then they sometimes get harassment for using Englishisms in French. So he does a good Gallic shrug, and publishes in English.
It's interesting to think about. The scientific revolution did depend on a number of independent developments. Some of these are negative, like the lack of official rules for the English language. Publishing technology is at the core of a lot of science. Right now, we're going through the pains of switching to new technology (the Internet) that's orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than what Gutenberg gave us. The societies that do this right will be the scientific leaders in a few decades. This might not be an English-speaking society, if the current "Intellectual Property" debate goes the way it has been going in the English-speaking parts of the world.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.