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."
Harvard was created so that they would be able to copy it. You know part of a bigger plan.
It's a good thing they're a lawyer mill. Because Harvard's going to sue the shit out of them.
Now, I'm not going to say all Creationists are dumb. I've met a few who aren't. But what in the hell were these guys thinking? "Oooo... let's use their video. They'll never catch on, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it?"
Dumbasses.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
(C)Copyright 4000BC God
All rights reserved
Reproduction other than by the means provided for in your licence agreement is prohibited
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Doesn't it make more sense to believe that Harvard stripped out the creastionist commentary from the video and slapped on a copyright notice? It would be far too complex to edit a Harvard video to add commentary, thus I must go with this simpler explanation and blame Harvard.
God created everything.
Trev - used to be interesting. Honest.
They ignore common sense, who could have guessed they would ignore other peoples copyright?...
...the film was originally intelligently designed. Then it evolved.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Fuck the creationists, those bunch of dumb-ass bitches, ...
every time I think of them, my trigger finger itches,
They want to have their bullshit...taught in public class,
Stephen J. Gould should put his foot right up their ass!
What to choose, what to choose...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The difference is, that the average downloader is not changing the words a little then claiming the work as their own. Those people are called "rap artists".
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
To call the Discovery Institute's use of the Harvard video merely "copyright violation" overlooks the more fundamental problem, because the DI did not just copy and redistribute the content without permission, but in fact (a) distorted and misrepresented the meaning of the content via overdubbed narration, and (b) knowingly misrepresented the authorship of the content. The former is fraud (though perhaps not in a legal context), and the second is plagiarism (which does satisfy the legal definition).
Violation of copyright is really only the superficial issue, and only addresses the ownership of the original work.
The creationist/intelligent design cabal is successful because since the time of Darwin, they have understood that their views cannot be defended through legitimate scientific inquiry, and can never be by definition. Therefore, they attack evolution by natural selection by appealing to and exploiting public passions, fears, and ignorance, and cloaking themselves in psuedoscientific legitimacy. They hope to insinuate themselves into rational discourse by invoking a false sense of objectivity and open-mindedness, appealing to the public to "hear both sides," which is merely a sophistic tactic to put their position on equal footing with decades of confirmed and verified scientific theory.
In the end, what I truly don't understand is why the creationists are so hell-bent on disproving evolution. History has shown us time and time again that when religion fights science, religion ends up with egg on its face. (Galileo and his support of Copernican heliocentrism comes to mind.) If I were devoutly religious, the last thing I would want is to try to prove God's existence, because then such a proof would obviate the need for faith in the first place. Such a desire to enshrine one's belief in the language of science seems horribly misplaced at best, and ultimately, is a far greater detriment and threat to religion than science. Meanwhile, the scientists can only follow the path that nature reveals.
Actually, no. You won't find ANY supporter of the "information wants to be free" idea arguing that taking somebody's work, striping the copyright, modifying parts of it and selling it as your own product should be somehow acceptable. Quite the opposite is the case: information DOES want to be free, but the COPYRIGHTS have nothing to do with it. Check tha recent law suits of BusyBox authors, or the numerous suits on behalf of the author of the netfilter software for example.
But I suppose you already know that and you were only trolling, correct?
Your post isn't going to be modded down because the rest of us are bigoted (or even merely biased) against your viewpoint, but because it fails to address the reality of the situation. (1) The Discovery Institute did not secure permission to use the video. (2) The video was shown with the copyright removed. (3) The substance of the video was changed by overdubbed narration that implied that the video depicted evidence of intelligent design in biochemical mechanisms. (4) Through the removal of copyright information and failure to refer to the actual source, the DI plagiarized the video by presenting it as its own original work rather than a derivative work. This action is not covered under fair use.
I would also like to point out that complaining that your post will be modded down is not somehow a sort of magical incantation to prevent it from actually being modded down. That sort of reverse psychology does not work, especially when you fail to have any legitimate points.
That depends on whether you tried to pass the video off as your own creation. That, in essence, is the core of the issue with the Discovery Institute's usage. Despite the title of the summary, the copyright violation is not what lies at the heart of this matter--it is the plagiarism. Surely your students cannot reasonably assume you were the sole author of the video. The same could not be said of a large, well-funded organization such as the DI.
If you're a creationist, everyone in here is a troll. What, with the science-voodoo and all.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Your post is misleading, because the controversy over intelligent design, and the problem that scientists have with it, is not that it is true or false. The creationists/ID proponents would like people to frame it in such a context, because it pits scientists against dogmatic faith in a supernatural creator. I will only say this once, because it is so obvious that it is a wonder that it needs to be said at all:
The problem is that the theory of Intelligent Design* is not science.
Note that this statement does not say anything about the truth of ID. It merely states that ID as a proposed explanation of the origin of life does not satisfy fundamental criteria necessary to be called science. I cannot tell you whether ID is true or false, because I DO NOT KNOW. But I can tell you that it isn't a scientific theory. Why its proponents seem so desperate to enshrine it as science and somehow believe that shrouding it in the mantle of science would increase its legitimacy, I cannot understand. I am perfectly willing to entertain the notion that the universe had a divine creator, as I am also willing to entertain the notion of a supernatural origin of life, as are many scientists. But as scientists, none of us can rationally place those notions in a scientific framework.
*Note that I use the phrase "Intelligent Design" here in its broadest context--that the origin of life is supernatural, rather than in its specific statements that strive to demonstrate this claim (e.g., the argument of irreducible complexity).
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.
The majority view here on Slashdot is:
Does that answer your question?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
No.
That's not hypocritical. They didn't just copy the Harvard video, they stripped the copyright statement! That's plagarism. Note that even the most liberal OSS licenses (e.g. the two-clause BSD) still maintain that you are not allowed to remove the copyright notice. And I doubt you'll find many slashdotters who would claim that plagiarism should be allowed.
If they had just copied and distributed the Harvard video, I'm sure not many people here would have objected.
I'm a scientist. If you make copies of my articles and propagate them, I'm happy. If you take my articles, change a few things, remove my name and add yours, I'm angry.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.