Slashdot Mirror
Creationists Violating Copyright
The_Rook writes "The Discovery Institute, more a lawyer mill than a scientific institution, copied Harvard University's BioVisions video 'The Inner Life of the Cell,' stripped out Harvard's copyright notice, credits, and narration, inserted their own creationist-friendly narration, and renamed the video 'The Cell As an Automated City.' The new title subtly suggests that a cell is designed rather than evolved."
The Copyright Act allows the copyright holder to choose between actual damages and statutory damages, which may be as much as $150,000 per infringement. Furthermore, it is not out of the question that punitive damages will be awarded if the infringement is intentional and egregious, which is arguably the case here. Traditionally, it has been assumed that punitive damages are not available for copyright infringement, but courts have awarded them in some recent cases.
No. This is something completely different.
It would be right if we found the video without any narrative buried deep in the remainings of an ancient civilisation or something else. Then both narratives would be part of a discourse how to interpret the video. Then the video would be the raw scientific data, and both narratives had their rightful purpose.
Here it is different. The video is in no way raw data. It was choosen, cut, mounted together to help explaining something. In this case the narrative is the core of the video, and the pictures are merely there to illustrate. As someone who routinely draws comics as a hobby I always was playing with the possibilitiy to erase all words in a comic strip and then fill in something else which narrates a completely different story. Misinterpretation of a sequence of pictures is thus no "scientific discourse", it is always possible. At most it shows that the pictures alone are not enough to make the case for what Harvard wanted to explain with the video (but Harvard added the narrative anyway because the knew it was not enough). If the Institute wanted to show that, they might have a case, albeit a weak one.
But in this case it is just making a derivative work of someone else's work without a) getting a permission and b) without attributing it correctly. This is purely a copyright case, nothing else.
You might want to read my response in another thread before you jump to conclusions about what I am or am not saying about intelligent design. I am hardly brainwashed.
I stand by my claim that the DI misrepresented and distorted the original content of the video, precisely because the original narration does not make any statement about how these biochemical mechanisms came into being, and because it is reasonable to presume that the video's content was developed by scientists, they could not legitimately believe that intelligent design furnishes a valid scientific framework for these mechanisms' existence. The logical conclusion is that the subsequent use is a distortion.
Furthermore, to compare this misrepresentation to an AMV on YouTube may be valid from a legal standpoint, but invalid from a sociopolitical standpoint. For instance, you would not want the media to similarly play fast and loose with content they did not author or to fail to cite or document their sources (though quite unfortunately, they often do--hence the introduction of the word "truthiness" in our modern lexicon). It is not reasonable to hold all such forms of content manipulation to the same standard, as those with a background in journalism and/or art history could point out.
I find it interesting that so few people seem to have a problem with the failure to make the proper attribution, and the implications thereof. There is no reason not to, unless the intent is to mask the true authorship of the original work. That this is something that happens on YouTube does not make it less egregious, or any more justifiable. Perhaps these increasingly lax attitudes towards plagiarism is an unfortunate reflection of the great ease with which information is replicated and manipulated nowadays, and the corresponding difficulty in determining the original source.
The majority view here on Slashdot is:
Does that answer your question?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
ID arguments fall apart under their own theory. Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one. There is no testable statement here. The only valid test would be to put an empty jar in a room and wait for "the designer" to place a new form of life in it. I haven't heard of any successful experiments of this type :).
Their current argument though would look at a tree's cells and all of the complexities that go on and say that there is no way it could have evolved. ID just says evolution is false, it doesn't try to explain anything itself. Take just the leaf of a tree though. If you just look at it, you would say someone designed it, placed everything exactly where it was and made this beautiful design. If you know anything about biology, or if you just watch a leaf grow from spring to summer, you will see that it wasn't placed there, it grew out of the tree. ID proponents would say that is hogwash. There's no way that a seed could turn into a tree. Just look at them, the seed is so small and the tree is a complex structure with many types of cells. Someone had to design each leaf and place it there, there's no way a single seed could become a whole tree with all the different leaves.
ID proponents don't claim this that I know of because they can see it happen. Everyone can observe a tree growing and we know that it ends up the way it is because of a natural process that begins with the DNA encoded in the seed and that is modified by the environment the tree grows in. They can't 'see' evolution occur so they dismiss it in favor of something written in a book thousands of years ago with no proof that most of the world's population doesn't even believe. In reality, we've observed DNA mutations and even speciation events. They can't comprehend the size of the Earth and the billions of years that it has existed, so they claim evolutionists just "throw billions of years at the problem" to explain it.
My favorite is when an atheist in a debate claimed that our large brain size was proof of evolution because prior to modern medicine, 20% of women died in childbirth due to the size of the babies' heads. The "true believers" claimed this was proof that natural selection was false because it caused the woman to die. If a larger brain gave even a 10% advantage to survival though, it would prove to be a total benefit to the species, and we can see now it has worked since we've become the dominant species on the planet due largely to our intelligence. If you look at it from a designer's perspective though, there is no plausible reason not to just make the woman's hips a little wider. From an evolutionist's perspective, the change just hasn't happened yet. Now of course there is little selective pressure since we have modern medicine and C-Sections available.