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Fair Use In Scientific Blogging
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Apr 26, 2007 11:28 AM
from the add-a-little-alcohol dept.
from the add-a-little-alcohol dept.
GrumpySimon writes "Recently, the well-read science blog Retrospectacle posted an article on a scientific paper that concluded that alcohol augments the antioxidant properties of fruit. The blog post reproduced a chart and a table from the original article and everything was fully attributed. When the publisher John Wiley & Sons found out, they threatened legal action unless the chart and table were removed. Understandably, this whole mess has stirred up quite a storm of protest. Many people see Retrospectacle's action as plainly falling under fair use. There is a call for a boycott of Wiley and Wiley's journals."
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News: Plagiarizing Wikipedia For Profit 223 comments
An anonymous reader sends word of a dustup involving the publisher John Wiley and Sons and Wikipedia. Two pages from a Wiley book, Black Gold: The New Frontier in Oil for Investors, consist of a verbatim copy from the English Wikipedia article on the Khobar Towers bombing. This is the publisher that touched off a fair use brouhaha earlier this year when they threatened to sue a blogger who had reproduced a chart and a table (fully attributed) from one of their journals.
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Ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
From Sec. 107 of the Copyright Act.
It doesn't get more simple than this. They've been hanging out with the RIAA too much...
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, I see that Wiley has followed Washington D.C.'s lead: before doing something objectionable, hire a junior staffer for blame absorption.
Unless, of course, anyone here actually believes that Wiley allows junior staffers to send out such demands without supervision. Uh huh.
On a more general note... these sorts of arguments about Fair Use are normal, healthy, and will occur regularly. Freedom and/or democracy means that there will be a great deal of public bickering. It's a Good Thing, because it means a) we aren't afraid to differ, b) we aren't afraid to talk about it, and c) we believe our countrymen are open to rational argument. A tolerance for this sort of tumult is a prerequisite to being a free society. Compare this to the fearful silence of a dictatorship.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, in addition, it creates a type of legal question-begging: if you routinely grant permission for what would be fair use anyway, no one can take you to court to say they don't need your permission to engage in fair use, so fair use rights can never be firmly tested. Very convenient!
Other questions to ponder are whether this is a routine scare-tactic from Wiley (
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In short - I wouldn't trust them as far as I could spit them.
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Maybe it's an ex-senior staffer who's now a junior staffer or is that even more unbelievable nowadays
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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The difference between Redundant and Informative can be so small... and the difference is placement. +5 for you.
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I'm not going to feel guilty about it, we've got the same timestamp... this was enough of an important update I figured placement at the top for readers/ would-be slashdot emailers was worth doing, don't need the karma... if an editor posts an update they can credit the other dude... and you know I was pretty much predicting a complaint like yours
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IANAL, but is "Lisa"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet thats what happened (Score:2, Offtopic)
I just think its funny. I think if they just asked Shelley, there wouldn't of been such a problem. Instead this nice little threat is posted for the world to see.
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That's odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
Come to think of it, industry researchers present slides with figures like that all the time, and it's not like there's a shortage of lawyers vetting them, and a lot deeper pockets for an angry journal to go after than some blogger has...
Agreed, and more so... (Score:5, Funny)
-Rick
Parent
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The latter are akin to artwork, which is what I think the blogger misses here. I don't really agree that she shouldn't be allowed to show a few select figures/tables,
Artwork ? You must be kidding, right ? All tables in my field are generated with a few latex macros, and figures with various plotting packages. Moreover, they are generated by the authors, not the publisher. You usually see a "reprinted with permission" when the figure is included in a an other paper or book that will be sold. Otherwize, it's perfectly fine to reproduce a figure or a table from someone else's paper, provided that proper credit is given.
but her argument that it's taxpayer-funded (and therefore free to anyone) doesn't hold water.
The purpose of scientific publication is to dissi
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Re:Agreed, and more so... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Citing v. Copying (Score:2)
Vanity is a tricky business. You want people to cite you. You don't want them to copy so much of your stuff, that the people who cited you get the future citations for your work.
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Re: That's odd... (Score:2)
it sounds like she did what scientists do routinely, so I can't understand why they're suddenly picking on her.
Is fair use usually applied to figures? It's commonplace to see a figure labeled "used by permission", though you never see it on quoted text.
I'm not asking how things ought to be, nor how existing law ought to be interpreted. Rather, what is established praxis? For some reason hearing a complaint over a reproduced figure surprises me less than a complaint over a similarly-sized quote would.
Re: (Score:2)
In journals, yes, in talks, usually not. A blog post is kind of a middle ground, although given that ScienceBlogs is a business venture (it is, right?) maybe it should be treated like a journal.
But as I said, now that she's changed the original post, it's hard to tell how appropriate the initial version was.
Re: (Score:2)
it sounds like she did what scientists do routinely, so I can't understand why they're suddenly picking on her.
Typically, scientists seek permission before reproducing figures for publishable work. Short quoted snippets and of course general conclusions regarding the work don't require it.
The response from Wiley sort of hints to this: ask us for permission next time, which we will grant, and this sort of mix up can be averted. This is how things are done.
Nice (Score:2)
I like how this article is juxtaposed with the MPAA story 'MPAA Committed To Fair Use and DRM' below. Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't this legal action have been threatened under the auspices of the DMCA? A bill which was bought and paid-for by the MPAA?
Fair use, my arse.
When Darwin Meets Publishing (Score:4, Interesting)
And it would seem that producing valid data in the form of a chart, publishing it and then going after someone for publicizing your findings is fool hearty at best, but sadly also very mean spirited and it works against the mission of the scientists in the long run.
I will not seek to help profit those who would still falsely believe in a captive audience, so therefore this publisher is coming off my reading list.
both sides (Score:4, Interesting)
They are known for extortion too! (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Publishers make you buy the answers seperately because they know desperate university students will buy it.
What I'm not sure is if you mean a copy or a photocopy.
loot at the actual link (Score:4, Interesting)
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What do the charts represent? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What do the charts represent? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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The only way to discuss the results of someone else's work in a reasonable way is to show those results.
Well, I work in the scientific field, too, and in most cases this is just not true. One must cite evidence, sure, but there's no requirement to reproduce it. As long as the citation is valid (i.e., accessible) and was published in a peer-reviewed manner, then that's sufficient.
For example, you can say, "Our results show a 35% improvement compared to prior work [Hodgman2005]." You don't have to show
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While I understand the intent of this argument, who's going to draw the line? If we take your view point with regards to scientific papers, does that mean bloggers, reporters, etc should only be allowed to mention what's in the abstract? Is the conclusion verboten because it goes into more details? Is a meta-analysis where you compare the major finding with another major finding crossing the line?
As Asimov said, "There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhe
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Wiley can bite me (Score:2)
This is why we need Open Access. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet despite the fact that these allegations have little merit (ethical or even legal), they create a very real chilling effect that slows science and decreases the distribution of information. Add to that the fact that most of this published research is funded by tax-dollars through government grants, and it becomes positively infuriating that the very scientists who do all the work are not allowed to freely disseminate the results of that work to the people, who pay for it.
This is why we all need to support the push towards Open Access [wikipedia.org] in scientific publishing. If you are a librarian, student, postdoc, academic or industrial scientist, you should be putting pressure on journals to open their content to the people who do the work and foot the bill. For instance, consider publishing in an open access journal (see list here [doaj.org]), or at least sign the petitions (US [publicacce...search.org] or Europe [ec-petition.eu]). Also see a discussion here [earlham.edu] which lists a bunch of things (small and large) that you can do to promote open access [earlham.edu].
fair use (Score:2, Interesting)
Academic journals are generally a mess (Score:5, Informative)
So yeah. Fair use in blogs is just the tip of the iceberg - the most egregious issue is that *we* are the ones who write, check, and prepare the documents, and then we have to pay again just to read them (and even if we don't pay directly you can be damned sure the libraries pass the costs down to us in the form of tuition and such).
Problem already resolved (Score:4, Informative)
Way to go blog-o-sphere, for making your voice heard. Though, interestingly, they didn't state that it fell under fair use, but rather they "gave her permission" to use the figure and data. So, maybe only a half-win.
Standard Procedure (Score:2, Insightful)
Not so new (Score:2)
Not censorship (as tagged) (Score:2)
This isn't fair use (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose I can (Score:2)
Lots of scientific journals need to be boycotted (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
http://pipeline.corante.com/ [corante.com]