Slashdot Mirror
Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?
Dr_Ken writes to mention recent coverage of a Harvard Cyber-Law study on Techdirt that analyzes the uses of copyright in the academic world. Some are claiming that the applications of copyright in academia are stifling and that we should perhaps go so far as to abolish copyright in the academic world entirely. "I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone."
It shouldn't be abolished, but fair use should no longer be restricted.
I'll take this further: it cannot be abolished, because in this field in particular, tools to combat outright plagiarism are pretty important. But it should be dramatically altered in ways that promote the free flow of ideas. It should be converted almost entirely into an anti-plagiarism tool, within this domain. Some sort of mandatory "go ahead and use this as long as you give full attribution" license ought to do the trick I think.
I agree. Without copyright every OSS product with significant academic contributions would suddenly lose GPL protection. There would also be huge legal fights for faculty over whether work was done on your own time (and therefore copyrighted) or done at work (and therefore public domain). You will also have trouble finding people to write academic textbooks - why write something if a publisher can just rip it off and make a (relatively small!) profit from your work? In addition you may see a significant brain drain from the US as faculty who make money from copyrights (authors from all disciplines, artists etc.) move to countries where their work is protected.
Indeed it would likely curtail sharing of material since I am more than happy to share my reserach code and educational material to those who ask for it under the CC non-comercial, share-alike license but would be far less likely to share if I knew some publisher could get hold of the material and sell it for profit (assuming they thought it worthwhile which is doubtful!) without my say. As you suggest what we really need is sensible fair use rights defined and enforced. Just because the current copyright system is being abused does not mean that the solution is to abolish it!
Copyright is vital, albeit flawed. Friend of mine made guitar lesson videos for YouTube, he spent half a year creating them, week after he posted them. Some dudes picked them up and uploaded them using their own YouTube accounts some of them have been placed above the original videos, gathering views, stealing credits, possible subscribers etc. Copyright is your only lever to prevent this from happening.
If the school is funded in any way by tax money, then its public domain. Take one dollar in tax breaks or tax money into the school and you're public domain for everything, period. No exceptions. No loop holes. Don't like it? Go to a completely privately funded school that gets nothing at all from the government. If you want to enjoy the benefits of using my tax money then I get to enjoy the benefits of you using my tax money. This bullshit of schools selling stuff I paid to research to companies which then charge me a fortune to buy it back from them needs to end.
I have no problem making our children and future generations more intelligent and throwing into the pot to better the future for all man kind. I have a distinct problem with throwing into the pot to make some asshole professor more money while he rides the coattails of the students that he cons into doing all of his research for him in exchange for little pay (in the case of a phd student) or the students actually helping to pay his salary as well!
If they take ANY money from the government then I'm paying for the research and I expect access to it. I don't give a damn if someone else donates money to the specific project, if the the school takes any money what so ever from the government then you can not disassociate that money from the project. So if they got government funding for something specific, such as paying for some other building on another campus, you still can not disassociate the funding from the entire school because money the school would have spent on its own for the now government funded building is used for these other projects.
The school IS NOT A PROFIT CENTER. Its an educational center.
A completely privately funded, doesn't get any tax breaks, doesn't get any government funding, doesn't get any of my money or benefits of the government which are sponsored by my money, can do whatever the hell they want to at their school. Anything that has ever seen a dime of my money however, should not be allowed to do research that I can not use for myself.
University research is public domain, sorry if that pisses some douche bag professor off because he can't use someone else's money to make a name for myself, he should have got a real job.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So because I'm outnumbered, that means I have no rights to my creation? You need better argument than that.
No, I don't think so.
Of course, you cannot be forced to create something; that would be unconscionable.
And having created something, you cannot be forced to show it to anyone else, to sell it, or to not destroy it; that too would infringe upon your rights.
But having created something, and having shown it to at least one other person, what right do you have to force that other person to not make his own copy? You're the one asking for a right to control other people. You're going to need their consent, or else you're going to have to use force, which would be unconscionable (and impractical).
Real property law works the same way. You can claim that you own the Brooklyn Bridge, but everyone will ignore you. If you try to stop people from crossing it, because everyone else outnumbers you, you'll find yourself in jail pretty damn quick, because the consensus opinion is that you do not own it, regardless of what you say.
The mere fact of creation doesn't change any of this at all. It's a red herring.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Why? What gives you the right to stop other people from playing that music? If you say someone is not allowed to play it unless they compensate you, why should they listen? They have the music, they have the band, and they're willing to play, and people are willing to listen. Why should you, a third party, have to give the go ahead every time? Just because you wrote the piece 5/10/20/50/100 years ago? Why should you get to sit on your ass forever collecting protection money from people who actually play music for a living?
I mean apply your logic to somthing like "Happy Birthday". What you're saying is that if the person who wrote happy birthday, or their estate, was still around, people shouldn't be allowed to sing happy birthday without paying that estate a fee. What lunacy! ....Oh wait.
No, it's worth less than that. The paper needed would probably come to something like, say, 10c. On the other hand the composition itself would probably take less than 1MB to store, costing fractions of a cent. It would cost a fraction of that to copy the file across the world. The composition is effectively worthless.
This isn't some abstract argument. The worth of data is going down and down. The forces of reality are slowly catching up with a concept that was always slightly artificial to begin with. You cannot reasonably expect people to treat data worth next to nothing as something worthy of sacrosanct protections. The modern surge in copyright infringement shows that people do not accept the status quo that abstract data has concrete worth and value. As our ability to store and copy ever larger data files increases, this attitude is going to become even more pronounced.
The only parallel I can think of in history for the current effect of technology on copyright is the effect of the printing press on translation of the bible. The church maintained for years that teh bible could not, even should not be translated into the vernacular, and that to do so was heresy. But as printing presses came of age, technology improved, and slowly more and more "heretics"/criminals began to translate the book and printed copies came into circulation.
Nowadays, we think nothing of a printed bible in the vernacular, or indeed someones right to make one. But back then it was a contentious issue. I think a similar fate awaits copyright. As technology improves, the status quo will slowly pass from unreasonable to nonsensical, and the whole concept of copyright will either have to go, or be amended so it can cope with the new reality of the digital age.
May the Maths Be with you!