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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 whole agrument is nuts and in truth doesn't justify a response. "God made it that way" ends all arguments for them so there is no rational thought behind their position. The real fact is there's an ocean of evidence for evolution and the true age of the Earth on one side and "God did it" on the other side. Where's the debate? The only evidence presented is heavily distorted scientific evidence. Gee sedimentary layers were left over from the great flood. Why are there different layers and different forms of life in each layer? No good response. Cells are very complex highly organized and self repairing, only a genius could have planned them. Or maybe it took a few billion years of trial and error? Why is this fictional date that some one came up with hundreds of years ago so important? It's not mentioned in the Bible he deduced it by adding up ages of the men listed in Genesis, some of them living nearly a thousand years which presents it's own set of problems. There is no form of evidence that will ever change their minds so there's no debate. They can complain all they want that science won't change but that's like trying to talk some one with a winning poker hand into the fact they just lost. Science doesn't need faith they have something far better, the facts.
There might be some claim of fair use for parody or for educational purposes.
... A topic I find boring.
Showing that you can stick a different narrative to a data set or to a film is a standard part of discourse. Even if intelligent design is fake science, putting a different narrative to data sets is part of the way real science works.
Scientist A says, "I have a data set and this is what I think happened." Scientist B might take the same thing and say "This story works as well."
Scientist B's showing that a different narrative works for the data is neither plagiarism nor copyright violation. It is discourse.
The article in the link was just about the utter contempt the writers feel about any ideas that fall outside the scope of their narrow little minds. I didn't bother watching the videos, but from the info in the blog I wouldn't say Harvard has either a slam dunk case on proving plagiarism or copyright violation. The fact that a copy exists without citations does not mean that the people doing the parody were passing off the work as their own. The parody clearly is not depriving Harvard of anything, which is the real kicker in copyright cases.
If this video simply exists to show that you can put a different narrative on a piece about cells, then it probably would pass the balancing test. If they were trying to sell it as their own research, it probably would not.
Of course, what people really want to talk about is how much they hate creationists
God spontaneously made the copyrights disappear.
They could make that argument work for 45% of the US population.
Ed
Either you're a scientist, or you're religious. You cannot be both.
./ joke? Whatever, I screengrabbed it for posterity! :)
Either you are committed to the scientific method, or you accept things based on faith. Again, no room for both.
If a hypothesis cannot withstand the rigours of scientific method, it must be discarded. When somebody refuses to let go of a cherished belief that has no basis in fact, they cannot justifiably claim to be a scientist.
No doubt I'll be pummelled here by the Christian Scientists for the "sin" of mentioning the bloody obvious, but that is their problem, not mine: I'm not the one pretending to be a scientist while professing belief in superstitions.
CAPTCHA = atheism. Some kind of
Yes, when science beat religion in Nazi German, it was great! ...
Oh wait, no it wasn't. You got Mengele, poster child for science without restraint.
It's so hard to tell what would be true here. Logically, it seems to me that putting effort into creating a derivative work should be more supportable than simply pirating other people's work without doing anything to it.
But I suppose nobody knows better the feeling of wanting to eat their cake and have it too than defenders of entertainment piracy.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Funny how it's fair use when you like the cause and copyright violation when you don't.