while i agree with ranulph's sentiment.  things are more complicated

many publishers ask authors to sign a copyrights agreement as a condition
for publishing.  if you don't sign it, your paper will not be published and
doesn't gain the circulation we authors hope for.

one way to circumvent this is to publish in journals that do not ask for
copyright ownership.  cybernetiucs and human knowing is one journal that
lets authors own the copyright of their work.  i think constructivist
foundations is another.

recently, i encountered the following problem.  i was invited by george klir
to submit my paper written for the 100th birthday of ross ashby in the
international journal of general systems he edits.  i used a line drawing by
roger conant, published years ago in the same journal, now owned by taylor
and francis. george warned me of the potential copyright.  taylor and
francis wanted to charge me $100 for taking an image from their journal and
put it back into that journal.  i was furious and simply redrew it with
improvements that made it sufficiently different.

but my fury against taking advantage of authors' legal weaknesses persisted.
and so, in he spirit of free flow of information, i proposed in the
international communication association, which owns several journals
published by publishers, to demand an end to this practice of charging
copyright fees for sections of previously published work.

the copyright charges are quite excessive indeed and we all need to oppose
them.  i edited a reader (on content analysis) published this year.  i
understand that republishing articles  by other authors amounts to making
money by one publisher from work owned by another.  the total copyright
expenses were nearly $10,000.  our publisher took care of half of it leaving
my co-author and myself with a bill of $5,000, which royalties will not pay
for by the most favorable estimation.

the point is that we authors are letting us being exploited by a system we
need to oppose

klaus 

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related
research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ranulph
Glanville
Sent: Saturday, June 27, 2009 10:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: copyrights and the net

I thought that academics published in order that others should know  
what we have found (and test it). The whole idea is to make work   
freely available. Most of u who are academics are anyhow paid for our
research and writing as part of our jobs. So we shouldn't be trying to get
paid a second time (not that many of us succeed, anyhow!).

Of course, copyright gets in the way of free availability. But, in my view,
it's not really copyright (which I consider an absurdity today:  
we need a different mechanism, which we won't get while we keep trying to
serve copyright) that is to blame. Who, I ask, demands the copyright of what
we publish, including all future forms it might take? The publishers. By
doing this, they are essentially undermining the attempt to make what we
have found widely and freely available.

Of course, this doesn't help the discussion of copyright etc. But I hope it
provides at least a viable perspective for why we should resist copyright
(and publishers).

We could, also, resist the absurd requirement to publish. I don't believe
I'm the only person who reads this list who believes they publish too much,
though I may be one of the few who will admit this.

I suggest we stop talking about copyright, and get on with promoting
publication that, while respecting (and, I hope, improving) standards, moves
towards better and cheaper access, even if this does destroy the publishers.

Ranulph



On 27 Jun 2009, at 12:42, Dave Crossland wrote:

> Hi Ann,
>
> 2009/6/27 A.B.Thorpe <[log in to unmask]>:
>> Dave,
>> This is an interesting perspective. You mention the "mature and 
>> sophisticated 'direct marketing' to monetise artistic works that 
>> newer artists who weren't able to get publishing contracts have been 
>> perfecting."
>> Have you got any good references for this?
>
> Marillion are the single best case study of pioneers in this area I 
> know of. Then, Magnatune and Jamendo are record labels that permit P2P 
> sharing of all the tracks they publish, and the artists hey sign have 
> been pioneers; then we have Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and Advance 
> Patrol releasing their tracks on the net in the same way. Fleet Foxes 
> recently spoke out in support of P2P; the Arctic Monkeys let their 
> fans do 100% of their marketing, they didn't even know what MySpace 
> was when they were #1 in the charts. And then Oasis, Jamiroquai and 
> Madonna have all quit their publishers to sell direct, albeit without 
> permitting P2P.
>
>> I'm interested from the standpoint of how design practice might 
>> function as a social enterprise where currently "intellectual 
>> property" is often seen as the basis for the "enterprise" part of the 
>> equation.
>
> Design is integral to all kinds of businesses, so I'm not sure which 
> kinds of design practices you mean.
>
> Here, though, are some more general thoughts on a lazy Satuday morning 
> :-)
>
> Fundamentally we have two kinds of businesses, product businesses and 
> service businesses. Product businesses have the potential for massive 
> profits compared to service businesses, because services involve 
> charging for individualised-customer processes in some respect, and 
> this limits their ability to scale up. However, they don't need 
> capital investment to design the product and mass produce it, they 
> just start proving a basic service and improve how good they are over 
> time; the journey of apprentice to mastery.
>
> So the gas man who came to fix my central boiler this year makes a 
> good living, being self employed and good at what he does, but he's 
> hard pressed to double his income; he could start a firm and hire 
> other gas men and work on his marketing and cream profit off the gap 
> between his wage costs and his charges, like British Gas do, but then 
> he's likely to be outcompeted by people like his former self who 
> provide a more personable service for cheaper. Doctors and lawyer are 
> the high end of this kind of work; all are about hourly wages, and 
> reseller margins on products supplied during the service (pills, 
> boiler parts). Typically the money curve starts at zero (you got a job 
> as an apprentice), tapers upwards with experience, and levels off (no 
> doctors on the billionaire list, plenty of very rich doctors though.)
>
> Product businesses, on the other hand, can scale up because they don't 
> customise their products for individual customers; they made generic 
> items that lots of people want. They have a money curve that follows 
> an inverse bell shape, where they need to borrow a lump sum, spend it 
> on R&D, and then start selling the product.
>
> Here's a napkin drawing: http://dave.lab6.com/acid/dump/2009/biz.png
>
> A key aspects of makes product business owners rich is that physical 
> products are "rival"; they can't be duplicated, and if you want your 
> own, you have to buy one, or borrow mine in which case I no longer 
> have it. But information itself is non-rival; it can be duplicated.
> Obviously, when I tell you something, I don't forget it, but since 
> owning and operating a printing press isn't cheap and easy, there was 
> an illusion for a long time that a novel or a LP was a product; when 
> information is instantiated in physical media, it takes on the rival 
> nature of physical goods.
>
> In the three-player game of authors, publishers and readers, the 
> publishers were the ones who converted information into physical form, 
> and reaped massive profits; typically they followed a product money 
> curve, paying authors and artists a lump sum to write/record the 
> novel/tune, and then started selling it as product.
>
> In the 1970s the personal computer shows up, and changes the game:
> Digital information is non-rival; we can share copies. This slowly 
> undoes the illusion that the physical media IS the work, and means 
> that the service of developing new works comes to the fore. Its taking 
> 30-40 years, of course, but that's the overall trend as I see it.
>
> Now, if you wanted to get rich, you don't want to hear this. You want 
> to pretend that a digital copy is like a physical copy, and can not be 
> duplicated by users at no cost. Copyright law makes it illegal to not 
> pretend, copy restriction features in software try to keep up the 
> illusion, and there is a huge propaganda campaign to persuade people 
> to accept the notion of "intellectual property."
>
> But, of course, the publishers can duplicate copies at no cost. This 
> is what Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, meant when he said 
> "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century" - who wouldn't 
> want a monopoly over a product which costs you nothing to produce...
> And this is precisely how Bill Gates got to be the richest person on 
> the planet in record time. Gates first became famous when he got angry 
> that early personal computer owners wouldn't play along with the 
> charade and wrote "An Open Letter to Hobbyists" to all the computer 
> hobbyist magazines in 1973. The letter remains a lucid argument for 
> this position today, but stands in stark contrast to GNU/Linux and 
> companies like Red Hat 35 years later.
>
> The reality is that digital information is not rival like a physical 
> product. In fact, it is "anti-rival," so that there is an overall 
> benefit when it is freely shared. This is what the Fleet Foxes guy is 
> on about - 
> http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86428/band-praises-p2p-for-helping-artist
> s-discover-music/
> - more people listening to wider range of music encourages demand for 
> new music. Wikipedia grows on the same principle; as it got more 
> pages, the desire to add more pages increased.
>
> In this way, a collection of service businesses can cooperate in the 
> creation of anti-rival digital information; no particular one has the 
> majority of the money flowing around the good, but there isn't the 
> same limit on scaling up. The napkin looks something like this:
>
> http://dave.lab6.com/acid/dump/2009/antirival.png
>
> Generally, I believe that approaches that discern the natural 
> properties of reality and work with them instead of against them win 
> out in the long term, and that while illusions can form concentrations 
> of power, that power will eventually wane because it has a hollow 
> base. I think that's what we're seeing with Windows vs GNU/Linux, and 
> what we will see in other areas over a long term.
>
> I do think that it will take A LONG time to play out though.