[GOAL] Re: Is CC-BY analogous to toll access?

[Patrick O. Brown]

This has got to be among the most specious arguments against
less-restrictive open access that I've ever heard.  If I take free tires
from a landfill and turn them into sandals and sell them, is that a bad
thing?  Doesn't prevent anyone else from taking the tires and making their
own sandals.   If I take photographs of a national park and sell them, is
that a bad thing?  Doesn't prevent anyone else from taking their own
snapshots.

Pat




On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Michael Eisen <mbeisen at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is one of the most ludicrous arguments I have ever heard. I requires
> mental gymnastics of an absurd kind to equate a system in which people use
> copyright to heavily restrict content to a system in which works are freely
> available in perpetuity. If people can build services built on top of the
> literature and people want to pay for them, even when the underlying
> content is freely available, that is the definition of added value, and is
> in no way comparable to a system in which the underlying content is private
> property.
>
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Heather Morrison <hgmorris at sfu.ca> wrote:
>
>> A problem with CC-BY: permitting downstream use with no strings attached
>> is the toll access model
>>
>> The Creative Commons - Attribution (CC-BY) only license grants blanket
>> permission rights for commercial use to any third party downstream.
>> Proponents of CC-BY argue that this will open up the possibility for new
>> commercial services to serve scholarship. This may or may not be; this is a
>> speculative argument at this point. However, if this happens, this opens up
>> the possibility that these new services will be made available on a toll
>> access basis, because none of the CC-BY licenses is specific to works that
>> are free of charge.
>>
>> This is very similar to the current model for dissemination of
>> scholarship. Scholarly research is largely funded by the public, whether
>> through research grants or university salaries. Scholars must make their
>> work public (publish) in order to continue to receive grants, retain their
>> jobs and advance in their careers. They give away their work to publishers
>> with no strings attached, often signing away all copyright. A few
>> publishers have taken advantage of this system to lock up scholarship for
>> their private profit.
>>
>> One potential outcome of a CC-BY default for scholarship is a next
>> generation of Elsevier-like toll access services. Many scholars and the
>> public whose work was given away through CC-BY could be unable to afford
>> the latest and best services made possible by their contributions. This is
>> just one of the reasons to give serious thought to this matter before
>> recommending a CC-BY default. For more, please see my Creative Commons and
>> open access critique series.
>>
>> Thanks to Heather Piwowar for posting an opposing view on google g+ that
>> helped me to work through this argument.
>>
>> from:
>>
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/a-problem-with-cc-by-permitting.html
>>
>> best,
>>
>> Heather Morrison, PhD
>> The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GOAL mailing list
>> GOAL at eprints.org
>> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
> Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
> Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
> University of California, Berkeley
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>


-- 
Support open access to the scientific literature
www.publiclibraryofscience.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20130314/17509b4a/attachment-0001.html