AIDS Denial Crazies Go All DMCA On Videos Educating People Of Their Craziness

from the abuse-of-power dept

We've made the argument before that it's about time we all took a hard look at copyright law and the DMCA, since both are regularly used as censorship tools. There are those that believe that this happens infrequently, but that just simply isn't true. It's used to censor criticism, to censor other people's original creation, and to censor negative reviews. It's a problem and no amount of pretending otherwise is going to wash.

But the problem really gets my blood boiling when the censorship in question is censoring scientific knowledge and criticism. All the more so when the criticism is aimed at a group of people that are quite likely actively putting anyone listening to them seriously in danger. Take, for instance, the story that jameshogg writes in about, in which well-known scientific debunker Myles Power is having a series of videos he produced debunking a documentary called House of Numbers DMCA'd by the producers of the documentary.

In case you can't watch the video, here's the skinny on the situation. House of Numbers is a documentary that essentially makes the claim that HIV and AIDS isn't really, you know, a thing. It's part of a conspiracy theory that's been traveling around for some time that AIDS isn't what doctors say it is, that anti-viral medication doesn't effect whatever the disease actually is, and so on. In other words, it's a big bucket of crazy that, unfortunately, some unsuspecting people take seriously, quite possibly putting themselves in harm's way if they take the message of the film to heart. Myles Power is a scientist who creates videos debunking this kind of thing. He, if I may say so, should be appointment YouTubing if you have any interest in science versus popular myths. He created a series of videos showing both why the claims in House of Numbers are bullshit, as well as the tactics the filmmakers employed in order to pretend people said what they actually hadn't. All of this, of course, falls squarely in the realm of fair use. That didn't stop several people who either produced or were featured in the documentary from filing DMCA claims against him and getting the videos removed.

The first DMCA filed against me was from Liam Scheff who starred in part 5 of my video series. Liam believes that my videos are not protected under fair use because they are not made for educational purposes, but instead for propaganda. Over the last week, Liam has been constantly posting on my Facebook and has called me a retard, a cunt, a little bitch and, of course, a paid shill. Yet at the same time believes that I have been slandering him. What is also bizarre is that even though Liam has made it clear of his intentions to drag me through the courts, at the same time he does not think I am a real person but part of Myles Power inc. Liam later went on to remove his DMCA, but by filing it in the first place he has left himself open to legal action.

As soon as part 5 was restored, it was taken immediately down by Martin Penny and the people at Knowledge Matters, who then decided to file 2 more DMCA takedowns against part 1 and 2. I want to take this time to remind people that there are multiple copies of House of Numbers uploaded to YouTube. If Martin Penny and the people at Knowledge Matters truly thought I was infringing copyright, then why are they not going after people who uploaded the entire movie? It is very clear that these people are trying to silence my criticism. For those who don’t know, Martin Penny is the Executive Producer of House of Numbers and a multimillionaire from Leeds who used to be the CEO of GHD. What’s interesting is that Martin is now a chairman at OHS Ltd – one of the leading health, safety and environmental consultancies who have worked for the NHS.

This is censorship in its purist form, and it's using the law to get away with it. There may be legal repercussions to be had for some of this, but how often do we actually see those attempting to ignore fair use and censor speech get punished? It's all the more egregious given that what they're attempting to censor is the debunking of a conspiracy myth that has the very real potential to hurt people. Anyone with a modicum of interest in science and the dialectic method would welcome such a conversation, not attempt to stifle it under the guise of copyright law.

Meanwhile, as Power notes, the person doing the censoring is the chairman of a consulting group that is advising the National Health Service in England. A censoring AIDS denier is advising the NHS. Let that sink in for a moment. Then, ask yourself it it's about time we took a hard look at whether the DMCA is doing more harm than good.

Filed Under: aids denial, censorship, copyright, dmca, science

Copyright, Invented To Combat Commercial Abuse, Has Become A Means Of Commercial Abuse

from the say-that-again dept

This post is from Jan Velterop, a long-time science publisher, who is one of earliest proponents of "open access" publishing. The following is actually a message he posted to an open access mailing list, which Mike Taylor republished. We asked if we, too, could republish it, and Velterop told us (as we tell people who ask us) that the work should be considered in the public domain, and to do what we want with it.

I've been following this discussion with increasing bemusement. Frankly, it's getting ridiculous, at least in my humble opinion. A discussion such as this one about licensing and copyright only serves to demonstrate that copyright, once conceived as a way to stimulate and enable science and the arts, has degenerated into a way to frustrate, derange and debilitate knowledge exchange.

I'm not the first one to point out that absolutely anything, under any copyright license or none, could be abused for evil purposes or, in more mild circumstances, lead to misunderstandings and accidental abuse. I agree with all those who said it.

The issue here is what science and scientific results stand for. Their purpose is emphatically not "to be copyrightable items." Copyright, invented to combat commercial abuse, has become a means of commercial abuse. The purpose of science and scientific results is to enrich the world's knowledge. Any commercial advantage – appropriate for industrially funded research – can be had by 1) keeping results secret (i.e. not publishing them), or 2) getting a patent. Science, particularly modern science, is nothing without a liberal exchange of ideas and information.

Ideally, scientific publications are not copyrightable at all, and community standards take care of proper acknowledgement. We don't live in an ideal world, so we have to get as close as we can to that ideal, and that is by ameliorating the insidious pernicious effects of copyright with CC-Zero and CC-BY licences.

The existence of the NC rider or stipulation for CC licences is unfortunate and quite damaging. Mainly because of the vagueness and ambiguity of what "commercial use" means. Ideas in published articles can be freely used for commercial purposes of any kind, as ideas are not copyrightable. Only "the way the ideas have been formulated" is covered by copyright, and thus by the NC clause in copyright licenses. In my interpretation, that means that most usage of published material that is not a straightforward selling of text or images can be freely done. But that's my interpretation. And that's exactly where it rubs, because all the NC clause does is introduce hypothetical difficulties and liabilities. As a result of which, NC practically means: "stay away from using this material, because you never know with all those predatory legal eagles around." In other words, it's virtually useless for modern, sophisticated scientific knowledge discovery, which doesn't just consist of reading papers any longer, but increasingly relies on the ability to machine-process large amounts of relevant information, as human ocular reading of even a fraction of the information is not possible anymore. At least not in most fast-moving areas of the sciences. Read this article, or similar ones, if you want to be convinced: "On the impossibility of being expert" BMJ 2010; 341 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c6815 (Published 14 December 2010 – unfortunately behind a paywall).

The taxpayer angle ("must be open because the taxpayer paid for it"), leading to Kent Andersonian notions of knowledge protectionism ("results of research paid by US taxpayers should not be available to non-US citizens unless they pay for it"), is a most unfortunate, visceral and primitive reaction and a complete red herring. For many reasons, not least because the taxpayer, or vicariously the taxman, isn't the party that pockets any money paid for paywalled information. Besides, how far do you go? Americans not being allowed to stay alive due to a cure that was developed with public money in Switzerland unless they pay through the nose for it to the Swiss tax authorities? The "as-long-as-I-am-well-the-rest-of-you-can-go-to-hell" personality disorder. The whole idea is so against the ethos of science that those even thinking in that direction must be taken to be utterly and entirely unsuitable to any role in the scientific community.

Access control and restriction via copyright was at best a necessary evil in the print era; the "necessary," though, has disappeared in the web environment.

Filed Under: copyright, creative commons, knowledge, licensing, open access, science

Copyright Week: Open Access As The Antidote To Privatizing Knowledge And Learning

from the locking-up-science dept

The very first copyright law in the US was officially called "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning." Indeed, that was the actual stated purpose of copyright law at the time. It wasn't supposed to be a system for protecting the revenue of artistic folks. In fact, it didn't even cover most artistic works at the time. It was limited to "maps, charts and books." Music? Not protected. Paintings? Not protected. Sculpture? Not protected. That's because it wasn't about artwork, but about the spread of knowledge through learning. Yes, the idea was to provide a limited monopoly to incentivize the initial creation, and the exchange was that it would then be given into the public domain soon after, such that everyone could learn from it. Yesterday, we covered the importance of the public domain, and today's topic for Copyright Week goes hand in hand with it: the idea of open access.

Copyright law was supposed to encourage greater access to knowledge to have a better educated populace. But the current setup of the law appears to do the exact opposite of that much of the time. When it comes to newly discovered knowledge, our copyright law (and the way it's used by some giant companies) seems almost entirely focused on making knowledge more expensive and less open thereby massively hindering the ability to share knowledge and better educate the public.

This has been seen most recently in the publishing giant Reed Elsevier's effective war on access to knowledge, using copyright law as a sort of weapon to block researchers from sharing their own research. However, as we've discussed for many years, the whole system is rigged against knowledge access and sharing, and in favor of giant publishers locking up knowledge -- often including research that was funded almost entirely by your tax dollars.

Here's how the privitization of knowledge works, thanks to copyright:

1. Professor wants to do some research, and files for some grants (usually from the government) to pay for that research. If that professor works for a state school, at least part of their salary is already partially paid for by public funds.
2. Government agrees to grant, provides taxpayer money to the researcher to conduct important research.
3. Research is completed, and the professor and some grad students/assistants write up the results in a paper.
4. Because academics are still (stupidly) judged on how often they "publish" in "prestigious" journals, the professor submits the paper to a few well known journals. In some (though not all) fields, the journals make the professor pay a submission fee.
5. The journals send the paper out to two peer reviewers, who do not get paid. They basically provide an editorial function to the publisher for free.
6. The journal "accepts" the paper, and demands that the professor hand over every possible copyright on the work and related research. I even know some academics who had to recreate their own research for later research, because they felt they were barred from using a chart they had created in a previous work without violating the copyright.
7. The publisher then sells the journal to academic libraries at absolutely insane prices. A freedom of information request at one university a few years ago showed that the university paid £688,093 -- or $1.1 million -- over a five year period for just three products from Elsevier, and only one of those products included full access to all of the published papers. The other two were merely for "abstracts and statistics." For just the popular 'Science Direct,' this one university paid between $150,000 to about $200,000 per year, for a subscription to just one journal.
8. Even when, as with the National Institute of Health, there's a requirement for "open access" publishing after one year, many journals will try to charge a very high fee (often thousands of dollars) to pay for "submitting" the paper to an open access repository.

In short, we have taxpayer funded research for which the publisher pays nothing, but gets the entire copyright, and then they sell the journals back to academic institutions for subscriptions often well over $100,000 per year -- and the research is completely locked up. Even more insulting in all of this, copyright was never the reason that the research was done in the first place. Remember, the purpose of original copyright law was to create an incentive for these individuals to do the research and publish the results -- but here, researchers are academics who are getting paid via grants, so the copyright is not the incentive at all.

It can be argued that copyright was at one point part of the incentive for the publishers to set up the peer review process, and then to help publish and distribute the works, but is that a process that is needed any more? It's difficult to see how. The things that publishers do (peer review, distribution) can be done much more effectively and efficiently these days, without the gatekeeper status or the insanely high prices. Oh yeah, and without locking up the knowledge.

Learning and scientific knowledge increases when we share knowledge, data and information widely and freely, allowing others to learn from it, to build on it and to continue to educate others and themselves. Today's copyright law does the opposite in almost every way. That's why radically changing how open access works and when it's expected is so important if we're to bring copyright law back anywhere near its initial intended purpose.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright week, knowledge, open access, privateering, privitizing, research, science
Companies: elsevier, reed elsevier

After Muzzling Scientists, Canadian Government Now Moves On To Book Burnings

from the return-to-the-dark-ages dept

Techdirt has been tracking the sorry saga of Canada's assault on free speech for a while, as it first muzzled scientists and librarians, and then clamped down on the public expressing its views. Now, it seems, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper is attacking knowledge by dismantling key scientific collections, as this post on The Tyee reports:

Scientists say the closure of some of the world's finest fishery, ocean and environmental libraries by the Harper government has been so chaotic that irreplaceable collections of intellectual capital built by Canadian taxpayers for future generations has been lost forever.

There seems to have been no attempt to find other homes for books, maps and unique collections of historical data, or even to offer them for free to the Canadian public that paid for them. Instead, they are simply being destroyed, some in literal book burnings:

Many collections such as the Maurice Lamontagne Institute Library in Mont-Joli, Quebec ended up in dumpsters while others such as Winnipeg's historic Freshwater Institute library were scavenged by citizens, scientists and local environmental consultants. Others were burned or went to landfills, say scientists.

What's strange is that even though the rationale for this mass destruction is apparently in order to reduce costs, opportunities to sell off more valuable items have been ignored. A scientist is quoted as follows:

"Hundreds of bound journals, technical reports and texts still on the shelves, presumably meant for the garbage or shredding. I saw one famous monograph on zooplankton, which would probably fetch a pretty penny at a used science bookstore... anybody could go in and help themselves, with no record kept of who got what."

In the light of these events, another top scientist made the following comment:

Hutchings said none of the closures has anything to do with saving money, due to the small cost of maintaining the collections. He, like many scientists, concludes that Harper's political convictions are driving the unprecedented consolidation.

"It must be about ideology. Nothing else fits," said Hutchings. "What that ideology is, is not clear. Does it reflect that part of the Harper government that doesn't think government should be involved in the very things that affect our lives? Or is it that the role of government is not to collect books or fund science? Or is it the idea that a good government is stripped down government? "

Hutchings saw the library closures fitting a larger pattern of "fear and insecurity" within the Harper government, "about how to deal with science and knowledge."

Or it may just be that the Canadian government doesn't want any inconvenient scientific evidence to get in the way of its dogma-based policymaking.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: book burning, canada, libraries, research, science, stephen harper

DailyDirt: Measuring Scientific Impact Is Far From Simple

How do you measure the impact of a scientist's research? Some common metrics include the number of publications in peer-reviewed and high-impact journals, the number of citations, etc. But it's more complicated than just using the quantity and quality of a scientist's peer-reviewed publications to determine their significance in the scientific community. Here are a few more things to consider.

• Researchers interested in an academic career, beware! Apparently, in recent years, it's become popular for universities to evaluate prospective hires based on their "h-index," which reflects both the number of publications and the number of citations per publication. However, a recent study has shown that current mathematical models that predict a scientist's future performance based on their past performance aren't reliable and shouldn't be used in career advancement decision processes. [url]
• Getting depressed because you can't get funding? Don't Despair... A study has found that grant size doesn't strongly predict a researcher's scientific impact. [url]
• Traditional metrics used to gauge a researcher's scientific impact are inadequate, since they typically assume that all co-authors of a paper contribute equally to the work. Now researchers are proposing a new metric that takes into account the relative contributions of all co-authors to establish a more rational way of determining a researcher's scientific impact. [url]
• This takes the cake: A new study has found that scientists are terrible at judging the importance of other researchers' publications. Apparently, scientists rarely agree on the importance of a paper and are strongly biased by what journal the paper is published in. Also, the number of times a paper is cited has little relation to its actual scientific merit. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: academics, citations, co-authors, h-index, merit, metrics, peer review, publication, science, scientific impact, tenure

DailyDirt: How To Really Cook

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Chemistry labs are usually pictured as a clean room environment with an array of colorful liquids sitting in weird glass containers -- or sometimes as an RV racing through a desert with some crazy guy in a gas mask and dead drug dealers sliding around on the floor (a la Breaking Bad). But home kitchens are also a type of chemistry lab, and food science is getting more advanced as people with entirely too much free time (ahem, Nathan Myhrvold...) experiment with novel cooking techniques. Here are just a few links for budding home master chefs.

• If you want to grill a nice steak at home, don't try to mimic how your favorite steakhouse does it. Steakhouses optimize for speed, but at home, you can take your time and get it just the way you like it. [url]
• Some fancy cooking techniques have been called "molecular gastronomy" to describe the intersection of food science and chemistry/physics. The definition of this field of study hasn't quite been nailed down, but some chefs are starting to publish papers in scientific journals. [url]
• Harvard researchers and professional chefs are teaching an online course for haute cuisine techniques. This introductory course has no pre-requisites, and starts Oct 8th.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: chefs, chemistry, cooking, edx, food, haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, science, steak

Canadian Scientists Call Countrywide Protests Against Government Censorship, Found Advocacy Group

from the lab-coat-fightback dept

Back in April, we noted that the Canadian government has been trying to muzzle various groups in the country, including librarians and scientists. It now seems that some scientists have had enough, as the Guardian reports:

Researchers in 16 Canadian cities have called protests on Monday against science policies introduced under the government of Stephen Harper, which include rules barring government researchers from talking about their own work with journalists and, in some cases, even fellow researchers.

Nor are these just a one-off, since they build on earlier protests:

The rallies, on university campuses and central locations in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver as well as other cities, will be the second set of protests in a year by government scientists against the Harper government's science policies.

Like last year, protesters have been asked to wear white lab coats on Monday.

There's also a new group called Scientists for the Right to Know:

In 2012, a Working Group of Science for Peace started to look into the muzzling of science and scientists in Canada. Muzzling is a broad process that may be carried out by governments, industry, universities, and others. However, we quickly realized that the current federal government is actually waging a war on basic science. While other Canadian governments have engaged in muzzling as well, we have never witnessed the type of systematic attack on basic science that is happening right now in Canada.

We therefore decided to focus at present on the muzzling of science on the part of the federal government. We also decided that we needed to find a means to engage the public at large. The focus of our work shifted, then, from researching the issue to advocating for unmuzzled science. It became clear that the work the group was envisaging would exceed the mandate of Science for Peace - education. We decided to form a new organization frankly devoted to advocacy.

It's not clear how much impact this new group will make, but it is indicative that at least some people are beginning to move beyond simply wearing white coats at protests to organizing a more active resistance. The big question is how much support it will receive from government scientists around Canada.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: canada, free speech, science

DailyDirt: Get Your Own Satellite

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Private space technology is becoming ever more affordable. Not too long ago, only large governments were able to send stuff into space. Now, large companies can do it, and even some wealthy individuals can control their own satellite (or their own part of one). Here are just a few (more) interesting projects that suggest satellites will be ever more accessible to regular folks (and not just for satellite TV or internet access).

• George Clooney controls a satellite that has spied on Sudan since 2010. The Satellite Sentinel Project promotes human rights by keeping an eye on possible war crimes. [url]
• NASA couldn't continue operating its GALEX satellite due to budget constraints, so it's lending the aging satellite to Caltech to keep it running and observing ultraviolet wavelengths in our galaxy. This is the only satellite currently observing UV events, and this science mission is being privately funded to keep it going. [url]
• The European Student Earth Orbiter (ESEO) mission aims to put a micro-satellite in low Earth orbit to provide students hands-on experience with an active space project. It will be launched in 2015-2016 and stay in orbit for at least 6 months. [url]
• The Arkyd project has succeeded in achieving its Kickstarter goal, making a crowdfunded satellite a reality. Planetary Resources is expected to deliver a functioning satellite sometime around August 2015. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: arkyd, caltech, esa, galex, george clooney, inexpensive space projects, micro-satellite, nasa, satellite, satellite sentinel project, science, space, sudan
Companies: esa, kickstarter, nasa, planetary resources

DailyDirt: Mistakes In Science Publishing

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

It's amazing some of the stuff that gets published in peer-reviewed scientific journals these days. For example, recently there was a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal in which the images appeared to be photoshopped. The photoshopping was so badly done that it was obvious upon looking at the images that they were doctored. The paper was withdrawn after this was discovered, but why didn't the journal editors catch this before it was published? Here are some other examples of questionable things that have made their way into journals.

• The supporting information for a recently published chemistry paper contained an editorial note that was inadvertently left in the published document. Not only did the journal's editors fail to catch this, but the paper's author is apparently being told to make up fake data: "Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis..." [url]
• A bizarre and completely unintelligible journal article that was recently published in a peer-reviewed journal has people wondering if it's a joke. The author spends most of the time explaining, in the most convoluted and incomprehensible manner, what the paper is apparently about, without really telling the audience what the paper is about. [url]
• The number of retracted scientific papers is increasing -- but not necessarily because more scientists are fabricating, falsifying, or modifying data. It's more likely because there is now an increased awareness of research misconduct, a greater audience thanks to the internet, and better software to detect plagiarism, image manipulation, etc. The blog Retraction Watch keeps track of scientific papers that have been retracted. [url]
• Check out some of last year's worst scientific mistakes, missteps, and misdeeds. These include at least one author who faked the e-mail addresses of and impersonated his paper's reviewers. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: authorship, fake data, fraud, journals, peer review, publishing, retracted paper, science

DailyDirt: Scientists, You Too Can Be Rich And Famous!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Science isn't glamorous. It says a lot when kids these days are more familiar with Mark Zuckerberg than they are with Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Edison, or Isaac Newton. So, what better way to inspire and encourage scientists than to recognize and reward them for their innovative work with huge cash prizes? Here are just a few examples of some lucrative science prizes that are being awarded to exceptional researchers.

• The $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize recognizes major achievements in fundamental physics. The prize is given out by The Milner Foundation, which was established by tech investor Yuri Milner. Compare that to the Nobel Prize in Physics which awards winners "only" $1.2 million. [url]
• The Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists gives out $250,000 in unrestricted funds to exceptional young scientists under the age of 42. Each year, one winner is selected in each of three fields: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Chemistry, and Life Sciences. [url]
• The X Prize Foundation has already handed out $10 million to the first team to successfully launch a reusable manned craft into space twice in two weeks. That honor went to Scaled Composites, the company behind SpaceShipOne. Curious about the guy behind the X Prize? Check out this short film called "The Sky is NOT the Limit" about Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize Foundation. [url]
• The Michelson Prize in Reproductive Biology is awarding $25 million to the first researcher to invent a cheap, single-dose method for sterilizing dogs and cats. This will hopefully eliminate the need for millions of euthanasia procedures performed each year on animals. Twenty-two research teams are already working to solve the problem. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: awards, biology, chemistry, innovation, life sciences, physics, prizes, research, science, technology, xprize
Companies: scaled composites