I'm surprised that there aren't already laws to deal with this. As in, some legal requirement to remove the DRM when shutting down the service.
If they can just shut down the service and remove what you legally purchased, then surely that was false advertising in the first instance. You weren't actually buying the books; you were, at best, renting them.
You Techdirt guys really need to stay within your area of expertise. I love all the articles here on IP and technology, and I've been reading for years.
However, your understanding of British politics is horribly simplistic and it is beginning to get irritating. Please stop.
Given the blatant similarity between Monster energy drinks and industrial chemicals, I would say that there probably is cause for confusion in this case.
I worked in academia for a while a few years ago, and preprints were quite useful back then too. My university had its own repository of papers which were either the final version if open access had been paid for, or the pre-print version if it hadn't.
The final version of the paper accepted for publication had already gone through peer review, so the only real differences between the pre-print and print versions was the formatting. The actual content was identical.
Peer review is also over-rated. I've had papers reviewed and commented on by people whose comment were so bad that I was left not entirely convinced by the end that they could even read.
It's interesting, because I worked in engineering academic research in the UK until very recently and have published a few papers with Elsevier (since they own all the big journals).
One of the requirements of the UK funding councils (public bodies) was that all research must be published open access. Part of the conditions for getting our research grant was that we had to allocate funds to cover the costs of publishing open access, precisely because it is publicly funded and must therefore be publicly available.
The other thing that we used to do was just upload the unpublished version to the university's institutional repository. The content was basically identical to the public version, but not covered by copyright and covered in highlights and unformatted, so you could read that version and just cite the published version.
It is a matter of great confusion to me as to why these kind of paywalls exist in academia at all. All the papers I've written I want to be read as widely as possible and as many copies to be made as possible so more people read them. As a researcher, "protection" does not help me at all. Unless I wanted to patent it or something, but then why would I publish at all?
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by nick.
(untitled comment)
I'm surprised that there aren't already laws to deal with this. As in, some legal requirement to remove the DRM when shutting down the service.
If they can just shut down the service and remove what you legally purchased, then surely that was false advertising in the first instance. You weren't actually buying the books; you were, at best, renting them.
Or is it just me?
Stick to tech (as Nick)
You Techdirt guys really need to stay within your area of expertise. I love all the articles here on IP and technology, and I've been reading for years.
However, your understanding of British politics is horribly simplistic and it is beginning to get irritating. Please stop.
(untitled comment) (as hamillhair)
Pre-prints have been a thing for a while (as hamillhair)
The final version of the paper accepted for publication had already gone through peer review, so the only real differences between the pre-print and print versions was the formatting. The actual content was identical.
Peer review is also over-rated. I've had papers reviewed and commented on by people whose comment were so bad that I was left not entirely convinced by the end that they could even read.
Re: (as hamillhair)
One of the requirements of the UK funding councils (public bodies) was that all research must be published open access. Part of the conditions for getting our research grant was that we had to allocate funds to cover the costs of publishing open access, precisely because it is publicly funded and must therefore be publicly available.
The other thing that we used to do was just upload the unpublished version to the university's institutional repository. The content was basically identical to the public version, but not covered by copyright and covered in highlights and unformatted, so you could read that version and just cite the published version.
It is a matter of great confusion to me as to why these kind of paywalls exist in academia at all. All the papers I've written I want to be read as widely as possible and as many copies to be made as possible so more people read them. As a researcher, "protection" does not help me at all. Unless I wanted to patent it or something, but then why would I publish at all?
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by nick.
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