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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."

8 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. didn't we already pay? by Spacepup · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:didn't we already pay? by stefanlasiewski · · Score: 5, Funny

      If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?

      Ah, but you didn't pay for the results. Results costs extra. Good results cost even more.

      --
      "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
    2. Re:didn't we already pay? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    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.

  2. 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
  3. 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. :)

  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).

  5. Re:web designer by fm6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.