Should Copyright Be Abolished On Academic Work? | Hacker News Reader

Should Copyright Be Abolished On Academic Work?

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19 pointsandreyf25 comments

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.

At last someone else who realises that copyright is not just about financial considerations but includes the moral rights too.

Without copyright licenses like GPL won't work as the license is no longer more liberal than the status quo but instead is attempting to add restrictions.

Without copyright you have no right to be named as an author of a work; you have no way (outside libel law) to prevent a spiteful sod from modifying your work to discredit you.

FWIW those who receive funding from taxation, IMO, should be required to release the results under a BY-SA style license.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, FUCK professors! Just because they've spent an inordinate amount of time becoming experts in their field, including extensive vetting by their renowned colleagues, they just expect things like "jobs" or "credit." Who the fuck do they think they are?!

What do you think about what I said though?

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

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.

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.

Let's get rid of patents first.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

I am talking about the case where a company "sponsors" University research and then owns all rights to anything the research team creates (via patents).

Get your own research team, that's not what the universities are for, especially ones my taxes pay for.

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