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."
Let's give them a shout! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:didn't we already pay? (Score:5, Interesting)
My (previous) employer is a non-profit organisation, created by and partially funded by the local government. They get more than just public results out of the place, they also get jobs (1500 at the place where I worked and a lot more in companies created and/or attracted by us). Not to mention millions of foreign high-tech investment from all the big names in our industry, which is good for the economy. Not to mention also the fact that we publish over 1000 research papers each year, so you can earn your dollars using results that our government and partners paid Euro's for. I.e.: it wasn't even your tax money in the first place!
And since we were non-profit...
Re:How Do You Know??!! (Score:5, Interesting)
if getty images wanted to support this cause, i'm sure the designer or the organization could have negotiated out a pro-bono deal with them easily. getty commonly supplies non-watermarked high-rez images for their regular customers if you ask. i've downloaded high-rez images from them and even stock footage for project presentations. no designer in their right mind would use a watermarked image like that.
Something's up (Score:2, Interesting)
When I went to the site, I didn't see any watermarks in the images, which indicated to me that the Prism Coalition had fixed the problem, either by acquiring the images through the proper channels or by painstakingly editing the photos.
Then I went to the Google cache [72.14.209.104] of http://www.prismcoalition.org/ [prismcoalition.org]. The bar at the top says that the cache was made on August 23, four days before the blog post from the summary. There are not any watermarks in the Google cache. If the cache is accurate and accurately dated, then the watermarks were added and then removed sometime in the last four days. That is, if they ever were there at all.
Something fishy is going on here. In addition to the fishiness that was the original topic of discussion, I mean.
Re:Taxpayer research is public domain (Score:3, Interesting)
No; it didn't have a single cause. Gutenberg certainly made a major contribution and helped to enable the Enlightenment. But his technical advance potentially made publication easier and cheaper for everyone in the world, not just in Europe. The really important advance wasn't in the hardware, but rather in the "software", i.e., in the social structure that developed the concept of open publication of scientific results. This could have been done anywhere, and could have happened before Gutenberg. It happened in western Europe, whose scientists took advantage of the improved publishing technology and put it at the core of the scientific enterprise. In much of the rest of the world, publishing was (and still is) controlled by the ruling classes, i.e., by politicians, so they lagged behind Europe.
There are other social innovations that were needed. I read an interesting comment a few years back, by a French researcher who explained why he always published in English. It had nothing to do with the size of the audience. His explanation was that doing good scientific work often requires that you invent terminology, and sometimes subtle differences in terminology can be the difference between a successful hypothesis and a failure. In French, there's a national language bureau that has the legal power to decide how the French language may be used, and it's full of people with no understanding of his scientific specialty. So he can't freely invent new terminology in French and use it in his publications. Well, he sorta can, but doing so risks legal harassment and possible revisions that would destroy the scientific usefulness of his work. The English language is an insane free-for-all without any official, centrally-controlled, legally-enforced rules. So in English, he and his colleagues can work out their own terminology without any official harassment. Once they think they've got it right, they can "borrow" the terminology into French, of course, but even then they sometimes get harassment for using Englishisms in French. So he does a good Gallic shrug, and publishes in English.
It's interesting to think about. The scientific revolution did depend on a number of independent developments. Some of these are negative, like the lack of official rules for the English language. Publishing technology is at the core of a lot of science. Right now, we're going through the pains of switching to new technology (the Internet) that's orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than what Gutenberg gave us. The societies that do this right will be the scientific leaders in a few decades. This might not be an English-speaking society, if the current "Intellectual Property" debate goes the way it has been going in the English-speaking parts of the world.