Copyright Law Is Killing Science

HansonMB writes "Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists' ability to make money from their work, scientists don't use similar incentives. And yet, her work is often kept within the gates of the ivory tower, reserved for those whose universities or institutions have purchased access, often at high costs. And for science in the age of the internet, which wants ideas to spread as widely as possible to encourage more creativity and development, this isn't just bad: it's immoral."

Comments

Minor document correction

[symbolset]

...To prevent the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for unlimited Times to Authors and Inventors and Trolls the exclusive Right to all Writings and Discoveries.

Re:Minor document correction

[jc42]

...To prevent the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for unlimited Times to the employers of Authors and Inventors and Trolls the exclusive Right to all Writings and Discoveries.

There; FTFY. ;-)

Patents as well

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

Government work should be public domain and PHD thesis I think are required to be. But the busness end of Academia is going whole hog into getting not only copyright but patents locked down. In my teaching they were trying to copyright all instructional material and video presentations with no benefit for the instructors. Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.

Re:Patents as well

[reebmmm]

Work at a different school or negotiate a better contract, if you can. At many universities, the inventors (typically the grad. student or principal investigator) are the owners of their own works, in the first instance, but they can always choose to let the invention be prosecuted and maintained by their TTO. The exception is for research done with Federal funds which is subject Bayh-Dole and, frankly, the terms of the sponsor agreement with the government.

Re:Patents as well

[geezer nerd]

I am retired now, but I never worked anywhere but that the company, as part of its conditions of employment, did not lay claim to any and all inventions that the employee might create during the term of employment. The employee is typically forced to agree to sell any patents arising to the company for a nominal fee, usually $1. I am not saying this is good or bad, but when you join the company, it is kind of hard to not know that signing on the bottom line agrees to this practice.

Re:Patents as well

[ClickOnThis]

Government work should be public domain and PHD thesis I think are required to be.

That's news to me. My PhD dissertation is copyright by me, although I granted my university and my country's national library the right to distribute it.

Some PhD dissertations can be classified Top Secret, if they involve state or military secrets. I know at least one person whose dissertation was such.

As much as I favor the broad distribution of knowledge, ultimately I think the distribution of the results will depend on what the researcher arranges or negotiates with the institution who is paying him/her. Generally I favor the individual creator having copyright control.

But the busness end of Academia is going whole hog into getting not only copyright but patents locked down.

Don't be too quick to dismiss academic involvement with patents. As long as the patents themselves aren't "evil" I think academic institutions can provide valuable support to researchers who want to file patents, as long as the terms are fair.

In my teaching they were trying to copyright all instructional material and video presentations with no benefit for the instructors. Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.

I agree that the instructors should be allowed to benefit freely from their own work. I confess I'm uncertain whether allowing a benevolent institution to hold the copyright (instead of the creator) is necessarily a bad thing.

Re:Patents as well

[StillNeedMoreCoffee]

I think one of the central issues is whether a patent stops progress or creates progress. It only creates progress in the incentive for new work to be done. It stiffles progress when others want to extend that work or improve on it or use it to create new work. The patent rights hold back innovation in this way. Therefore I feel that patents and copyrights probably don't belong in Acedemia. They should not be looking at extending the field of knowledge as a gold mine. Just like orivate prisons have a vested interest in laws that put people in jail. Institutions that have a vested interest in patents will support laws that get them the most money and control of IP at the expense of the general good.

Re:Patents as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Work at a different school or negotiate a better contract, if you can. At many universities, the inventors (typically the grad. student or principal investigator) are the owners of their own works, in the first instance, but they can always choose to let the invention be prosecuted and maintained by their TTO. The exception is for research done with Federal funds which is subject Bayh-Dole and, frankly, the terms of the sponsor agreement with the government.

Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university. Which fantasy university are talking about where graduate students can negotiate better contracts? Which alternate-dimension United States do you live in where students can actually just go from school to school as needed?

Re:Patents as well

[element-o.p.]

The company I work for had similar language in the contract I signed. However, before signing that contract, I negotiated slightly different terms with the HR person. Bottom line, I agreed that all software or inventions I created *on company time or with company resources* would belong to the company; however, any software or inventions I created *on my own time* were mine. I also agreed that I wouldn't use my "insider knowledge" of the company to create a tool that I knew the company needed on my own time so that I could license it back to the company, nor would I create products or services in my off time to compete with the company I work for.

So, yeah...the terms you mention are pretty much typical in the tech industry, but you can sometimes negotiate terms that will alleviate your employer's ethics or competition concerns while still allowing you to create and own things that are unrelated to the company's business interest.

Re:Patents as well

[element-o.p.]

Similarly, telling people to "work for someone else" doesn't solve the problem either - they *all* do this, you have no bargaining power at all, they have all the money.

Ummm...start your own business, then? My wife has done it twice in the last decade. It's a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that you will break even, much less earn the salary you earn as a cubicle drone in the tech sector, but if you don't like the terms of employment for anyone that's hiring, it IS an option. <shrug> I'm just not a big believer in the "I have no power at all" victim mentality.

Re:Patents as well

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh for mod points. This post is true. I've worked at three different universities and I own *none* of my work. In most journals (PLoS and the like might be exceptions but I haven't yet published there) you sign over your rights to the journal. Without a subscription, personal or through a university, I can't even read some of my own papers. For the one patent I'm on I got some cash from the university, but the university and not me is the patent owner. This is standard operating procedure and naturally the /. anti-intellectual property right trolls modbomb to oblivion a commentator who is 100% right. The oddity is that public ownership of published research that was done at public universities with public moneys is one of the rare areas where the typical /. anti-intellectual property right troll is actually correct and a position that the parent, probably my fellow academic, likely agrees with.

Re:Patents as well

[walshy007]

Because it's double charging. The artists who own their own copyright don't get paid at all except for royalties from their cds/itunes/etc and live gigs. If they get money from a record company up front typically all of their work belongs to the record company, then no royalties.

Getting paid by the government to come up with things and then charging them/the public for said things is double dipping, and just wrong. Either invent things in your own time for free and charge people for copyright/patents or accept a steady flow of income from the government/uni and accept they are not yours. (although in the uni case, you can argue you are getting paid to teach students, and that any inventions you come up with are separate and not part of the contract at least, but research positions are a bit different)

Re:Patents as well

[jc42]

Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.

It might be worth noting that some high-profile journals, notably Nature and Science, require that the submitter of the paper hold the copyright. If your university or research institute claims the copyright on your papers, you can't get them published in Nature or Science.

This sorta makes sense, since to publish them, the journal has to have a license from the copyright owner. Both of these journals have decided that they won't accept a copyright license from a corporation (and a university is a corporation); they will only accept the license from the author(s), who must have the legal right to give the journal a license to publish.

They have learned another lesson, too: Their agreements are worded so that after publication, any transfer of copyright must be approved by both the author(s) and the publisher. So Nature and Science can prevent the employer from claiming the copyright after publication. But I don't think I've actually read anything about how often they actually do this. Anyone know?

It might be interesting to get a list of journals that have adopted similar rules. I've heard of a few others that have done so, but I don't have any idea how common it is.

There's also the related topic of patents, which are often used to prevent researchers from building on each others' work. I'd wonder whether this might be the really serious threat to scientific progress. With copyright, you can buy a publication and then use any knowledge that it contains, as long as you don't plagiarize the wording. But with patent, you can't legally use the knowledge without permission from the patent owner. This is routinely used by drug companies to prevent competitors from developing improved versions of a drug. Without the patent owner's permission, you can't legally do the testing that's needed to compare the effect of your drug and theirs.

Re:Patents as well

[zero-point-infinity]

Not all universities make students and professors sign away their work. University of Waterloo policy is that the creators retain all rights, presumably because the university likes to brag about students who started companies based on work done in their research or as design projects. It's easier for students to form companies to brag about if you stay out of the way and let them do the heavy lifting if they want to. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find other schools with similar philosophies.

Re:Patents as well

[swillden]

I think one of the central issues is whether a patent stops progress or creates progress. It only creates progress in the incentive for new work to be done.

The purpose of patents is not to create an incentive for new work to be done. The purpose is to enable new work to build on older (patented) work, by convincing inventors to publish their inventions rather than keeping them secret.

The way to tell if a patent system is working is to look at how many inventors are making use of the patent database to get ideas, or to find solutions to problems they're struggling with. A really good patent system would make the following interaction commonplace (but with real content rather than technobabble):

Engineer: Hey, boss, I've been trying to come up with a way to reverse the polarity in the tachyon waveform inducer and I'm having some trouble. I have some ideas about how to solve it, but I think it's going to take me at least six months to work out the details.

Manager: Hmm. We had planned to have that done by the end of the quarter. Have you done a patent search to see if this is a solved problem?

Engineer: Not yet, but it's on my list of things to do. You really think someone has already got this figured out, and published it?

Manager: Heck if I know, but with millions of new patents being filed every year, I'd say it's worth at least a couple of hours searching.

Engineer: I'll get right on that.

[A couple of hours pass]

Engineer: Hey, boss! Good idea on the patent search. It turns out that an inventor in Okeechobee filed a patent for a really slick tachyon induction polarity inverter just last year. It's exactly what we need and she's already solved a bunch of problems I hadn't even considered. I think I can have a working prototype integrated within a few days after we get a license to the patent.

Mangaer: Great! Send me the patent number and I'll have our attorney get a letter to her right away. I'll bet we can get a license within the week. This will cut a month -- maybe two! -- off the time to market for our new product. Thank goodness for patents!

Re:Patents as well

[pieterh]

The whole point of a patent is to grant a temporary monopoly in exchange for teaching your 'art' to the world.

The 'trade secrets' argument is a crafted legend that was debunked in the 19th century.

tl;dr:

There were (and still are) four objections to the [inducement to disclose] argument. First, since most ideas develop simultaneously and independently in different places, no single disclosure is worth very much. Second, technological secret are hard to keep for long in any case. Third, when inventors think they can keep their techniques secret, they will not claim patents at all since competitors will be unable to duplicate the technique. Lastly, the patent system creates a disincentive for inventors to publish their ideas early on, since premature publication can ruin the chances of getting patents. So, rather than promote disclosure, the patent system actually hurts it.

Re:Patents as well

[Leafheart]

Maybe he is just outside the USA? Here in Brazil, at the good and serious universities (which are Public, by the way), a part of the patent an\or copyright is always kept by the researches, usually 50%.

Re:Patents as well

[Kim0]

So, the incentive is NOT to do good research or make good inventions,
but instead make stuff that looks like research and inventions to please bosses,
and hoard the good stuff for oneself, in the unlikely case one might profit on it later.

Re:Patents as well

[dcollins]

"Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university."

Bullshit. For example, CUNY policy on intellectual property (http://portal.cuny.edu/cms/id/cuny/documents/level_3_page/001173.htm)

General Rule:
1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works.
2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.

So clearly not "every university" and not "all intellectual work". Note that CUNY is the largest urban university in the U.S. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUNY).

Re:Patents as well

[Carewolf]

Non-US universities.

In some countries the author can not even sign away his rights, at best the employer can get automatic free licensing though the contract.

Re:Patents as well

[Phillip2]

> General Rule:
> 1. The Creator shall own all rights in Copyrightable Works.
> 2. The University shall own all rights in other Intellectual Property.

You missed out the entirety of the next paragraph which define the exceptions. As these cover almost all of the
most likely scenarios, it's a little empty. The policy does mean that if you write a text book, or you might be able
to retain copyright, although under normal employment law, the university would own that.

So the original poster was a bit strong in their statement, but he is not far wrong. For the individual scientist,
there is very little value in intellectual property; it's just a burden. And as anyone who has had to wade through
IP agreements with any regularity will tell you, it's a substantial one.

The interesting point is that the same most Universities also; in practice, they make very little money from third
strand activities, including IP rights. There are, of course, the occasional exceptions, where a single piece of IP
make a phenomenonal amount of cash.

In the case of the original article, however, he is referring to scientific research outputs. The only people who make
cash out of this are the publishers, who don't actually do anything useful any more. Scientists have kind of shot
themselves in the feet here. I expect it will stop eventually, but it's currently tied up with our promotion and grant
awarding systems.

Phil

Then don't publish there

[reebmmm]

Look: copyright has nothing to do with it. If you don't want the publication locked up, don't publish in journals that make you give up all your rights or negotiate a different deal. The fact is, on this point, copyright isn't necessary because the terms of the contract would just take over. If the publisher didn't want you to publish outside its pay wall it could ask you via your contract regardless of the copyright in the work.

This reflects more on the economic and business incentives of scientific journals than on copyright. The journals don't care about the copyright so much as they value the exclusivity and the first publication rights. Copyright is just a placeholder for a very simple non-publication clause and associated penalties (or liquidated damages).

Re:Then don't publish there

[Trepidity]

The paywall system wouldn't actually work without copyright. They could still manage to get anyone who signed a contract to agree not to republish it, but that would only bind the author. Other third parties might be bound by EULAs not to republish the version they accessed via a library, if the EULAs are enforceable contracts. But even in that case, if even one such third party leaked a bunch of PDFs onto the internet (violating their EULA), there would be nothing illegal about other people hosting it and republishing the articles, if they hadn't signed a contract (or agreed to an EULA). It's only copyright law that allows the publisher to demand takedowns of copies hosted by people with whom the publisher has no contractual relationship.

Re:Then don't publish there

[ShiftyOne]

Easier said than done. Tenure track positions rely heavily on publication in good journals. Losing your job over a copyright is not worth it for one person, it would take an industry wide movement, which is very hard to organize.

Re:Then don't publish there

[MozeeToby]

While it's true that without copyright the paywall and exclusivity agreements wouldn't work, that doesn't change the fact that the paywall and exclusivity are at the heart of the problem. Fixing this hugely important issue is something that can be accomplished almost overnight by those that it affects directly, the scientists and engineers whose work is being locked up. As opposed to copyright reform which is a political nightmare and actually quite a divisive issue for many people.

If you bring your shiny new ball over to a friends house and they're being a total dick and hogging the ball and not letting anyone else, including you, play with it why on Earth would you keep bringing every shiny new ball you get to that guy's house? The problem isn't that no one can make a million copies of the ball, the problem is that you keep giving this jerk your new toys. Take your ball home, if you can get it away from him, and find a friend who is willing to play nice. And definitely keep any new toys you get in the future away from the asshole.

Re:Then don't publish there

[c0lo]

Bingo. I would love to publish all of my papers in open journals, but can't afford the "loss of prestige".

Easily gained back: just refuse the Fields Medal after you publish a meaningful article on arxiv.org.
What makes the "prestige" of a journal? Why an "open journal" would not be able to achieve the "prestigious" status? Who's to blame for the fact that anything "open" in science is associated with the lost of prestige... even if there are "prestigious open source projects"?

If the academia doesn't like to contribute by at least a honest "open-source-like" peer-reviewing the work of others, why should I give away the protection of the copyright laws for my GPLv3 open-source code?

Re:Then don't publish there

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Nice advice, but that doesn't help me as a researcher right now.

Every day, as I search for papers to research, I encounter pay-walls asking for $30, $40, $50 for a single paper. If I had paid for every paper I wanted to read of the course of my academic career, I the bill would have run into the tens of thousands.

Multiply that by the number of researcher in the world and you begin to grasp the scale of the legacy problem that the world research community is facing. The last 75+ years of published papers are locked up forever in what is essentially an extortion racket.

Bottom line, following market philosophies and greed, the academic publishing industry has hiked prices to unbelievable levels. $40 for a 200KB pdf is by now, the industry standard price. True, researchers need not pay such costs up front if their library has paid for a subscription to the required journal, but this merely passes the cost to the library and the institution to which it is attached. (I suspect researchers at wealthier institutions are utterly oblivious to the problem of academic pay-walls as their libraries have subscriptions to everything.)

My position is simple. We don't need the academic publishing industry(Except for their illgotten trove of past papers). Papers are written, reviewed, and edited by academic volunteers for free. What should simply happen is that universities should publish their own journals, online, using the simple, cheap web distribution methods.

The academic publishers would kick and scream about government monopolies and such rot, but they are nothing more than parasites who are stifling legitimate academic research and progress and should be ignored. Their "services" cost no more than pennies for each journal annually, yet we are expected to pay a significant percentage of our national GDPs to access research which was originally funding by the public purse anyway. Scams like this make me wonder if something is pathologically wrong with western society.

Words by themselves are nothing

[RightwingNutjob]

Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind. That requires follow-through, and follow-through requires large amounts of money to turn a publication into a product*. The only way to attract that kind of money is either 1) get the Guv'mint decree that it be directed toward your pet project, or 2) entice Big Bigness and the Richest One Percent to fund it by promising them a cut of the revenue in a legally binding contract, enforceable in the legal framework set up by the same Guv'mint. Tell me why (2) is worse than (1), and show me an example of where the Public Option has succeeded on the same scale as the private option?

Re:Words by themselves are nothing

[dpbsmith]

For better or for worse, the "public option" probably deserves most of the credit for developing nuclear energy, the Internet, and space travel. Radio broadcasting as we know it was also large developed by the "public option," specifically university radio stations in the 1920s, a fact that was forgotten when radio became commercializable and commercial radio pretty well eclipsed the pioneers.

I don't think anyone can say what would have happened if the government had not chosen to fund these developments. The fact is, in the particular parallel universe we live in, they were developed publicly.

Re:Words by themselves are nothing

[NoSig]

Pretty much the entirety of basic modern physics and modern cryptography. Companies are happy to turn government science into products they can profit from, they are not happy to fund basic research. Yet basic research is what those products come from in a longer perspective. Companies only do the last step of research because it is only at the last step that it becomes clear what the profitable outcome is going to be.

Re:Words by themselves are nothing

[SETIGuy]

I know, I should avoid answering obvious trolls especially ones who see the world only in terms of a philosophy that, much like communism, doesn't ever work in practice.

(2) is worse than (1) because not all science can produce a profit. Even if it can, it might not be an immediate enough profit. For example, how long did it take for the photoelectric effect to have a profitable application? How about quantum mechanics? General relativity? Heliocentrism? Modeling of stellar interiors? Sequencing genomes of lichen?

If (2) worked the way you think it would, (1) never would have been developed because the rich wouldn't have allowed government to get in the way of their revenue generation.

Re:Words by themselves are nothing

[SETIGuy]

I forgot to add, show we a case where the private option succeeded without building upon the work developed by people using the public option.

Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Here's an article he got published in Nature back in 2001

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/stallman.html

Re:Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[bmo]

>He even claims the author can require require distribution of the source even if you merely run the software, as in the AGPL

BULLSHIT.

9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program.

What part of that do you not understand?

It's amazing how idiots like you read a license and then state with a straight face shit you know is wrong.

Restrictions? What about the restrictions on commercial software? Where is your freedom to make a clone of Word by reverse engineering the software, which the Microsoft EULA specifically forbids?

Go fuck yourself. I'm tired of hearing the unfounded GPL hate. You don't like the GPL? Fine. Don't use someone else's software published under the GPL. Don't download it. Don't modify it. And most of all don't distribute it if you are unwilling to follow the terms of the GPL

Sure is Softie shill FUD in here. Go astroturf somewhere else, asshole.

--
BMO

Re:Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[SETIGuy]

The GPL license doesn't make it illegal to distribute software unless you comply with the demand you also distribute the source. It's already illegal to distribute software that you don't own the copyright to. The GPL makes it legal to distribute the software iff you also distribute the source. The distinction is important, and you have failed to notice it.

Re:Stallman's been saying it since 2001

[Omnifarious]

Your characterization of the GPL is interestingly rabid, and your depiction of the AGPL is not entirely accurate. The AGPL only kicks in if people other than yourself access the software over a network. You could easily argue that much of what the software produces and sends over the network could be considered to be covered by copyright, and you are distributing all of that stuff to everybody who accesses it.

But, regardless, even if you were 100% correct, there is no contradiction. RMS has stated in various places that while he feels the GPL is the right license for 'functional works', for programs basically, that it may not be the right license for all things currently covered by copyright. For example, the GFDL is distinctly different from the GPL is several respects.

Limited resources

[diamondmagic]

Under natural law, you typically only own that which is limited, in such a way you can control its use exclusively. But what about ideas? They aren't limited resources, anyone can create their own instance of an idea, an invention, a writing... http://mises.org/daily/5108/Ideas-Free-and-Unfree-A-Book-Commentary

Copyright law has killed written articles?

[interkin3tic]

I'm interested in this. Not interested enough to watch a 50 minute segment on it. Is there a transcript somewhere?

If this is about open vs closed access journals

1. The situation is rapidly improving. While it's not where it needs to be, in the last few years we've seen a lot more journals providing open access.
2. The practice has been going on quite a while and we have yet to see science die. I don't think it can possibly be "killing" science. Limiting its potential, sure, but there's no way pay-for-access is having nearly as much effect as cutting funding for basic research.

Re:Copyright law has killed written articles?

[golden age villain]

Most science papers are put on free preprint servers such as the arXiv [arxiv.org] anyway.

While arXiv and the like are popular in maths and physics, that is unfortunately definitely not true for science at large. In most of the life sciences for instance, papers are published in peer-reviewed journals with a paywall and only there. There is only a handful of publishers operating most journals in large portfolios and forcing the university libraries to cough up big bucks for the access even if they do not receive the journals in print. For Joe Sixpacks, it is even worse as the publishers sometimes ask as much as 40$ or 50$ for reading a single article.

On the other hand, there are recent initiatives, like PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) and Frontiers (http://www.frontiersin.org/) which publish mostly online journals within a free-for-all access scheme. However, while anyone can read those articles, having them published costs quite a lot, around 2000€ roughly for both Frontiers and PLoS. So basically, while everyone can access those articles, only scientists from relatively rich institutions can actually publish in those journals. In all fairness, PLoS can offer the publication costs to some but still.

Killing Science?

[TapeCutter]

Hardly. This practice is a minor parasite riding on the back of Science, it's been there for at least 100yrs.

Not the point

[Chemisor]

A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige.

Re:Not the point

[Dachannien]

True prestige lies in having your work referenced by someone else.

Re:Not the point

[Bowling Moses]

"A scientist does not publish papers so they could be read. He publishes so he can put the citation on his CV for the purpose of improving his employment. Most of those "peer-reviewed" journals are not read by anybody; their value lies not in availability, but in prestige."

Do I publish articles to stick on my CV? You bet your ass. Those articles are at-a-glance evidence that when I say I know how to do skill set X, I've really done it. It also says that I get stuff done rather than sitting on my ass all day long. Where do I publish? The best journal I can (fuck Elsevier though) since prestige matters. Everybody knows what Science and Nature are. Everyone in your field also knows what the solid 2nd tier journals are and if you've published just there, that's ok. If you publish only in "The Whoosit Journal of Whatsit," then you've got a problem.

Journal prestige aside, do I want people to read my papers? HELL YES! Does it matter if people read my papers? HELL YES! Why does it matter? If people read my papers it's because they're either interesting or relevant to their own work, or both. If they read my paper, they may cite it when they write up their own results or review article. Citation indexes exist, the most well known is probably google scholar. What the hell do you think journal prestige comes from if not from the citations the average paper published therein gets? The higher the rank of the journal, the pickier they are about what they let in, and the higher the expectations that it will get read, get cited, and influence people! Journal aside, if your paper has been out more than a year or two and nobody's cited it, your stuff doesn't fucking matter--expletive required. If your paper has been out five years and is still getting a half-dozen citations a year, you got a middling paper that fills in some important details in your field--good for you your research matters! If your paper has been out for five years and gets two dozen citations a year and you've got another half dozen just like it, then in your field you're a force to be reckoned with and everybody and their dog knows who you are. Even stepping out to related fields your name is familiar, and if you're out job hunting it's easy to check and see how influential you are by asking around your peers or checking citation indexes (google scholar again). If nobody cites your stuff, then nobody reads your stuff, and then your stuff might as well be published in "The Journal of Shit Nobody Cares About." Who wants to spend years doing shit nobody cares about? God damn right I want people to read my fucking work--expletives absolutely required.

Does Copyright even matter any more?

[Prien715]

There's not a movie or album I can't find online for free or stream at my convenience for no fee. The only way copyright really affects people any more are people who seek to remix works and republish them. Wikileaks is another fine example. Information may not "want" to be free, but people want to share it. If anyone's really concerned about a certain piece of research's squelching affecting world prosperity, then go leak it there instead of crying about some need for law-change and encourage others to do likewise. The law will catch up eventually.

You can pretty much forget #2

[rsilvergun]

Businesses don't bother with anything that doesn't have big, short term profit. They let the Guv'mint (sic) pay for it :(. Right now there's work being done on a Leukemia vaccine... in Europe. No company in the states would pay a dime for the research, because it'd be a one time vaccine that only benefits a few million people (many too poor to pay $$$ for medicine).

Also, most of the major advances in basic science are done on the public dime, and then companies swoop in to monetize it. Look up the history of the Rail Roads in the US. Fact is, you can't build the giant cartel we know & love today w/o the Gov'mint (sic, again).

UK IP Law is worse still it seems

[Freestyling]

As an example:

Extract from the University Of Manchester IP Ltd Website http://www.umip.com/university_policy.htm:

The University of Manchester, through the provisions of the Patents Act 1977 and the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, owns the intellectual property rights (IPR) in patentable inventions, computer software, designs and other copyrightable material arising from the research activities of its staff.

The nett income from exploitation is shared with staff and their departments and in accordance with a reward scheme approved by the University's Board of Governors.

I am third year physics student in the UK, hoping to go on to do PHD work in one of the nuclear energy fields, most likely fusion research. The big thing that has worried me for a while is the possibility that I can make a discovery only to have the University I work for pounce on it with patents and copyrighting that prevent the unhindered use of that discovery to improve the world.

I'm not for a moment bigheaded enough to think I would make such a discovery personally, but the concept is a frightening one; the idea that a technology that could revolutionize some part of our world never seeing the light of day, because an academic institution is more interested in profiteering than in actually furthering the cause of science.

As a previous poster (RightwingNutJob) said "Moral science isn't about publishing (peer-reviewed) papers for all to see. Moral science is about understanding the world For the Betterment of Mankind."

Problem is investing in development of real world things from this research is costly, and not always successful. If before even starting on the research a company has to pay through the nose to license the idea, that makes said company less likely to bother in the first place surely?

Open Source University Anyone?

Re:UK IP Law is worse still it seems

[jc42]

How does the U make a profit on your idea if it never sees the light of day? Doesn't the profit motive give the U incentive to get your innovations out to the world?

There have been any number of histories written explaining that the primary effect of patent law has always been to block further progress until the patents expire. There was a widely-quoted example a few years back, explaining why James Watt didn't make any profit from his improvements to the steam engine during the time he held several critical patents. He spent all his time and money on legal battles with other inventors, with the result that none of them were able to actually implement the steam-powered railroad engines that were to become so important in the next (19th) century. Rather than licensing each others' inventions to each other and combining them into a good engine, they each wanted total control, and refused to license their inventions to the others. Watt finally set up a profitable business after all the critical inventions became public domain. This was in part because he managed to hire a lot of the people with the needed expertise.

This story includes a nice example of how interlocking discoveries can work. Watt did build a much better (more powerful, safer) steam engine. But its power went into a piston, which produced back-and-forth linear motion. Another inventor discovered a linkage that translated this linear motion into a smooth rotary motion, which was needed if the engine were to drive vehicles with wheels. But patent law and the courts prevented these two inventions from being combined in the same mechanism, because neither inventor would license his invention to the other. So one had a good engine that delivered jerky motion to a vehicle's wheels; the other had a linkage that gave smooth rotary motion, but could only use the primitive steam engines of earlier decades.

Copyright law isn't as disastrous to progress as patent law, since copyright mostly limits the words you can use to describe something. This does interfere with communication, and encourages the development of disparate incompatible jargons. But patent law blocks the use of the actual ideas and discoveries, so it can easily become a total barrier to further progress. And historians have been telling us that this is mostly what has happened in the past.

Re:What if the Bible had a copyright?

[Pfhorrest]

Something close to that used to be the case. Not copyright per se because there was no such thing as printing and every Bible was transcribed by hand, but for about the first millennium and a half of the Church's existence most Bibles were written in Latin, which only the clergy could read. So to most people possessing a copy of the Bible would have been pointless; it was locked down, in effect, by a primitive DRM. A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages so that people could actually read what God (supposedly) had said himself, rather than just taking the local priest's word for it.

Re:Paradoxical contradiction

[king neckbeard]

You seem to forget another reason to pay someone less: because you can. For example, let's say you are working for a company and your research does something quite useful. Said company patents and copyrights that useful research as much as they can, and if a rival company wants to hire you, you have less utility to them because the first company has locked the second company out of your most direct expertise. Ignoring other factors for the time being, with copyright/patents, If the second company does hire you, they would have to pay you less because you are less useful to them. Because the second company will pay you less, the first company does not have to pay you as much to keep you from leaving.

Wrong

[sqrt(2)]

Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists' ability to make money from their work

Nope. Stop right there. It may be said that it is supposed to do as such, but today we see copyright being used by PUBLISHERS to control the artists and restrict users. Copyright as it is today is immoral, and no one has an obligation to recognize it as legitimate. We're all free to disregard it as much as we can reasonably get away with without personal harm from the enforcers in government who slavishly back the copyright cartels at the expense of our freedom and culture.

Better headline....

[LordLimecat]

"Sensationalist Headlines are Killing Slashdot"

Newton?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Think about it. Should Newton have had to pay Galileo, or is it just cool that we now understand that the same gravity which pulls apples to the ground is what holds stars together?

Or, for that matter, should Einstein have had to pay Newton, or is it just cool that we now understand that matter can be converted to energy and vice versa? What about Schrodinger -- should he have to license Einstein (or the other way around; I'm a bit fuzzy on the history), or is it just cool that we now understand that particles are waves, and things we thought of as only waves are also particles?

If everyone had to "license that shit", you wouldn't be posting this, because you wouldn't have such a thing as a computer. If it wasn't for this licensing bullshit, we'd be living even more in the future than we are now.

Bad science? history repeats itself once again.

[recharged95]

Hey remember when Galileo was persecuted on his ideas of Science (heliocentric) and during that time Ptolemaic/Aristotelian scientists where at the top of their game? And back then ancient Greek philosophy/science was treated as correct, fact, and not questioned. Of course, also in Galileo's time, science was heavily integrated into business, politics and religion... hmmm. sounds familiar?

Well folks, we are in that same pattern currently. I'm just waiting for that Galileo-type scientist to appear to change the paradigm once again for the better of the human race. Unfortunately with the way information moves today, it's going to be someone we don't expect (some that does stuff in an unorthodox way) and faced with much harder resistance than 1600. We are at that time in history again my friends--and it is actually good.

Professor/Researcher gets percentage of license

[perpenso]

Are you really that fucking stupid??? *Every* university requires that their graduate students and professors sign away all their intellectual work while at the university.

At the University of California researchers, both faculty and students, are required to inform a technology transfer office of any discovery that is potentially patentable. This agency handles all the paperwork and other legal issues, and it also handles licensing the patent to interested commercial organizations. The fees collected for the licensing gets split:
*** 25% for the researcher ***
25% for the researcher's department
50% for the UC system

Also the fees take into account the nature of the licensing organization. Small local startups are changed less than large out-of-state conglomerates.

At least that's what I recall from the presentation I attended in 2007.

Re:Poor Science

[mjwx]

Looks like science is remarkably hard to kill.

Finally a target worthy of my skill as a hunter.

Jeeves, prepare my shotgun and book me on the fasted boat to the country where Science lives. By Job I'll gut him.

Paywalls are absolutely hindering MY research

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Hello,

    I can say from my personal experience that these paywalls on journal articles are hindering my ability to accomplish research. My institution doesn't normally subscribe to medical journals, yet it looks like the best source for some information I want is in those journals.

    However, I can NOT tell for certain from abstracts that the articles actually contain ANYTHING of use to me.

    It comes down to a case of playing 'bobbing for apples, for $40/shot'.

    This is a sorry state of affairs.

--PM