Copyright Advocacy Group Violates Copyright 176
word munger writes "Commercial scholarly publishers are beginning to get afraid of the open access movement. They've hired a high-priced consultant to help them sway public opinion in favor of copyright restrictions on taxpayer-funded research. Funny thing is, their own website contains several copyright violations. It seems they pulled their images directly from the Getty Images website — watermarks and all — without paying for their use."
didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
"They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it."
If the research is funded by the public, didn't we already pay to see it?
It's ok when *I* do it (Score:0, Insightful)
How Do You Know??!! (Score:1, Insightful)
As far as I can see, just the appearance of the watermark isn't a certain indicator that their copyright was being violated at all. Did anybody ask Getty?
I love how slashdot posts some blog entry and states definitely that this was copyright violation. If only they were this hard on people and sites who you know, pirate movies,music and games.
Re:May I be the first to say.. (Score:1, Insightful)
In many labs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:0wned (Score:1, Insightful)
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I particularly enjoy rubbing your noses in my towering intellect. On a personal note, I am an avid mustard enthusiast.
mookie da wookie
Re:The difference is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Taxpayer research is public domain (Score:1, Insightful)
It's our data.
web designer (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to defend their movement or anything, but assuming the site wasnt made in-house by an "IP believer", the situation is ironic, not hypocritical.
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
End of story. Spare me the "but some was private and some was...", blah, blah, blah, crap. Your company held out its greedy little hands to take OUR tax dollars. Any knowledge gained from public money must be given back to the public. Period. No jumping through hoops or other fancy legal crap to keep from returning the publics ROI. We want our dollars back with interest or with gained public knowledge.
Re:web designer (Score:5, Insightful)
Honor among thieves? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:web designer (Score:5, Insightful)
In general, that's how organizations respond when they decide they shouldn't be doing something: they tell their people not to do it, and sanction them if they don't listen.
So Prism is going around telling other organizations to implement a policy while failing to implement it themselves. Sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public should be outraged that their money is used to fund research that is then restricted from them. The corporate sponsors should also be outraged, for they too have to pay the publishers for access to research which they already funded!
Why should the researchers agree to surrender control of the information to a publisher, who uses it to turn a profit, rather than distribute the information openly? The open distribution suits the needs of the academics much better: it is better for science because the information is freely available to be analyzed, improved, and built upon. It is also better from a career standpoint, because free dissemination increases one's citations and reputation.*
The fact that science receives a mixture of corporate and public funding changes nothing. In the current system, *everyone* has to pay for access to information. Even the people who funded the work or did the work have to pay for access, whether they are a university, a corporation, or the public. Something is very wrong with that antiquated system.
(*Note: Open access is better for the career of an academic if all other things are equal. The main roadblock to open-access is that scientists feel pressure to publish in "high impact" journals, which are the older, more established journals. Thus at present there is a conflict between the desire to publish openly, and the desire to publish in high-repute journals. Luckily the landscape is changing, with more journals moving towards open policies, and newer open access journals gaining reputation quickly.)
Scholarly publishing is a moneymaking scam anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
In order to get your article published you have to subscribe to the journal and in most cases the society that the produces the journal. When you get published you don't get paid and the publishers take the copyright. Because they take the copyright when you want to revise the paper, turn it into a book, or even pass it out to use in your own class you have to get permission. Now they always give permission but they are under no legal obligation to do so. They own the article outright.
Then the journals turn around and sell access to their articles to a database company like ebsco or someone else. That database company then charges universities for access to those articles.
As academics part of what we get paid for is to publish. So the university pays us to publish and then turns around and has pay someone else to get access to those very same articles that they paid to have written in the first place. Sure they get access to lots of other articles written by people from other universities but the fact is they are paying twice for these articles. I'm sure there are lots of other businesses that wish they had the same business model.
To top it off, as I said earlier, a lot of these journals are the official publications of academic societies. These societies are organized by academics in the field for academics in that field. It is supposed to help with the advancement and promotion of that area of study. So why are they taking the copyrights of their members? Sadly, most academics don't know or care about intellectual property and so the few times I've asked that very question I've been met with "I don't know" or the editor of the journal trying to defend profiting off our backs.
May they just linked the wrong images? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Godwin's Law (Score:2, Insightful)