

Should Copyright Be Abolished On Academic Work? - andreyf
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090724/0445155649.shtml

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lutorm
I'm not entirely convinced of this. I totally believe in open access, but
putting papers in the public domain would mean that people could lift content
and pass it off as theirs, which I think should not be allowed. (It would
still be unethical, of course, but I'm not sure that is a big deterrent for
some individuals.)

Maybe the standard should be to license papers under something like the
Creative Commons Attribution license.

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wmf
Who has used copyright law to punish plagiarism? This "feature" isn't worth
preserving if no one uses it.

~~~
pbhj
I use CC licenses, usually BY-NC-SA. I don't actively enforce it but I feel I
have a right to be named and to have a cut of the money if others are making
money directly from my work without otherwise requesting permission.

Copyright enables this: I have the right to label the work as mine, I have the
right to license it as I see fit.

If you plagiarise my work (not worth it!) I don't have the funds to chase you,
if I did I would and I feel the law should give me that option. If you credit
me and share any derivative works then I'm happy for you to use it, unless
you've maliciously amended it and are crediting me - then copyright gives me
remedies.

Copyright terms stink like pig shit. Copyright is not all bad.

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jacquesm
If it is publicly funded definitely. Otherwise there might be restrictions
(I'm not in favour of universities being in bed with companies but I
understand there is a lot of money involved and that combined with the push
for "applicable research" (in other words stuff that makes money) makes it
harder for universities to resist such funding.

~~~
wmf
How common is it for the funder and copyright holder to be the same? I do
corporate research and the copyright on my papers ends up owned by ACM, IEEE,
Usenix, etc.

~~~
jacquesm
Which is absolutely beyond the pale.

Tax money I give to the government, they give it to the universities who then
do research and I'm locked out of the results.

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justin_vanw
So, you have a job where you are required to show up for 6-12 hours per week,
8 months per year. For this you are paid between $60k and $200k per year. As
part of this job, you are expected to publish papers which document your
original work for the benefit of mankind. Any professor who doesn't put any
and all work they do while employed by a public university into the public
domain (or the closest thing allowed by their university) is the lowest of the
low. I can't describe how I feel about such a person without a very large
amount of swearing.

Suppose someone came to your house and tell you that they want to work on a
way to make your electric bill go down, but unless you give them some money up
front they won't have enough time to both hold down an outside job and work on
your electric bill. Then, after a while, you ask them how it's going. They
tell you that you can see the results of their work if you pay them $50. That
is exactly what some people do, except they collect less money and collect it
from way more people. Dirtbags.

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scott_s
Most researchers make their work as publicly available as possible. It's in
their benefit to do so: the onus is on them to convince their peers their work
is good and significant. In order to do so, they want to make it as easy to
find as possible.

Also, your time breakdown of a professor's week is absurd. They're required to
be _in class_ for 6-12 hours per week, but every (good) hour of lecture
requires about three hours of prep time. Grading work takes time. And their
greatest time sink is research. A young professor trying to attain tenure is
putting in 60-70 hour weeks, 12 months of the year. Research continues when
classes aren't in session.

You're getting upset over the actions of a person who doesn't exist.

~~~
justin_vanw
Where did you get 3 hours? If you know someone who prepares 3 hours for a 1
hour lecture, and it's not their first day or something, they have some kind
of anxiety disorder. The best lecturers I know just walk into class and start
writing on the board and explaining things. Sometimes they have to ask the
class what the material they are supposed to go over that class is. They can
do this because they are competent. If you don't know what you are supposed to
be teaching well enough to just teach it, you are wasting your student's time.

Professors, especially good researchers, don't grade homework themselves
unless they feel like it.

Professors are _compensated_ research. For them to make money on the side with
the intellectual property they were compensated fully to create is just
dishonest.

Use the logic that professors should get to keep intellectual property they
were paid to develop to any other profession. Coal miners should keep the coal
they mine? Magazine editors should get to take their work and put it in a
separate newsletter?

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scott_s
I got three hours from my own experience. I'm thinking of young professors who
are in their first few years of teaching. You can't just walk into a class and
expect to pull a good lesson out of thin air. Knowing material and being able
to teach it well to students are two different things. _Teaching_ is a skill
that is independent of the knowledge you're trying to impart. Developing that
skill takes time and effort.

Professors frequently have to grade their own homework. TAs are not in
infinite supply. I know my adviser commonly has to grade his own assignments.

I said nothing about professors getting money from the IP they created. In
fact, what I said was that most professors make every attempt to make their
work as freely available as possible. It is in their own best interest to do
so. When you do research in academia, your hardest problem is convincing
others that your work is good and worthwhile. In the rare circumstance where
academic research leads to something that could be sold, the patent is always
joint with the university.

You're upset with a person who doesn't exist.

~~~
justin_vanw
You say they get to keep IP jointly with the University. Then you say that
that person who keeps IP doesn't exist...

You are talking on the general plight and struggles of academics, which is
another subject, and a subject I have no comment for. This or that aspect of
being a professor really has nothing to do with this topic.

I am saying, again, that anything a professor develops, designs, or discovers
while collecting a salary or having his research otherwise paid for out of tax
revenues should have no ownership of it or financial compensation for it
whatsoever (prizes are not compensation), and it should be placed in the
public domain, just as the work of a government employee would be.

Financial benefit should go to the party taking the financial risk. A
professor takes no financial risk when he researches things, as he collects a
salary regardless of his success or failure in any course of research. Rather,
all financial risk and cost is paid out of tax revenues.

~~~
scott_s
Academics _can_ patent their work jointly with their university, but they
rarely do. They have very little incentive to do so: the gulf between what an
academic produces and something that is widely useful is usually huge, and
academics are not evaluated on patents. Most universities would probably
prefer that professors and graduate students patent their work, since it's the
university that's more likely to benefit. But professor and grad students
rarely bother because, again, they have no incentive.

I brought up professor work habits because I felt your impression of their
work burden is wrong. I also got the impression that your mistaken impression
was feeding your contempt.

Let me put it this way: I am unaware of any academic who meets your
description. All that I know and know of disseminate their work freely.

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oldgregg
Journals don't take up that much bandwidth-- someone just needs to get around
to launching thepiratejournal.org.

~~~
sethjohn
I thought through this with a friend a while ago.

The problem isn't getting the bandwidth to upload the content, the problem is
getting access to content in the first place. In order to download PDFs of
these papers, you need to have a subscription through your school/institution.
The publishers will notice very quickly if someone starts downloading an
entire journal's worth of articles.

~~~
chris11
I think a lot of professors put up their papers on their own websites. But
that would really be a pain getting the articles from different places.

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jrockway
Let's get rid of patents first.

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Locke1689
Software patents I could see, but I find no compelling evidence to get rid of
patents in general...

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dantheman
Agreed, software patents need to go. I'd also throw in business method, and
biological (dna) patents out too.

If we step back and look at intellectual property, I think it can be safe to
start arguing against all intellectual property other than trademarks.

~~~
pbhj
To play devil's advocate:

Why should someone researching battery materials, testing various combinations
for charge holding and minimal voltage fluctuation, etc., be rewarded with a
patent when someone doing the same with DNA sequences for increase grain
yields be prevented from getting a patent.

What about a new type of phone closure mechanism. There are thousands of
patent applications (or were in my day, though I never worked on this
material) for phone flips and sliders.

What about a qubit based factorisation circuit - and then how about the
completely novel software required to pass instructions to that circuit. The
hardware interface between qubit and IC, how about when it's done using FPGA
(effectively software).

How about software alterations that alter the battery use in a phone through
microswitching that extends the battery life beyond the benefits of the new
materials in my first example. Why rule out software that can have a greater
hard physical effect and allow hardware that may not make as good an
improvement. (note "technical effect" is a route to getting a software patent
in Europe).

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dantheman
I personally thing that government involvement in the market, granting
monopolies is actually harmful and we should abolish all intellectual
property. Now it is proper for the government to stop fraud so trademarks and
plagiarism would still be valid government concerns, but deciding what
deserves and does not deserve a monopoly would be out of its reach.

~~~
blasdel
The problem is more that these days the patent publication is totally useless
-- it doesn't describe anything useful for copying the 'invention', and is
totally obvious to boot.

The government is granting a not-so 'limited monopoly' for what is essentially
a trade secret. If software patents required full disclosure of source code
and schematics, they wouldn't be nearly as shitty.

