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Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)Posted Aug 29, 2012 19:21 UTC (Wed) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205)In reply to: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org) by cmccabe Parent article: Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0 (freeculture.org)
> The confusing thing about all of this to me is that research papers are all _supposed_ to be derivative works of each other, at least in theory. Standing on the shoulder of giants, and all that. However, I imagine that the courts choose to interpret one research paper citing another (even a lengthy cite) as not creating a derived work-- otherwise academia would grind to a halt amidst copyright disputes. I imagine this is covered under fair use.
As Wol pointed out, litigation would be career suicide, but the bigger reason that this never happens is that academics have very little respect for copyright law anyway. This is party due to the "standing on the shoulders of giants" attitude scientists tend to have have, but exacerbated by the borderline theft perpetrated by the textbook publishers, the anti-science policies of the likes of Elseveir, and the innate sense of injustice one gets watching the MAFIAA literally destroying lives.
The amount of flagrant copyright violation that goes on in private between academics is staggering (photocopying entire chapters of textbooks, emailing PDF's of copyrighted books). This behaviour is encouraged by many, not just for convenience's sake, but as a form of protest.
One professor I knew, who seemed to have more respect for the law than most, had a textbook publisher release a new version of an introductory statistics textbook, which had no real changes, other than to jack the price up to over $200. His response was to turn his course notes into his own textbook, which is CC-licensed and sold by the university bookstore for roughly the cost of printing.
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