Creationists Violating Copyright 635
The_Rook writes "The Discovery Institute, more a lawyer mill than a scientific institution, copied Harvard University's BioVisions video 'The Inner Life of the Cell,' stripped out Harvard's copyright notice, credits, and narration, inserted their own creationist-friendly narration, and renamed the video 'The Cell As an Automated City.' The new title subtly suggests that a cell is designed rather than evolved."
Re:My alternative theory... (Score:3, Informative)
Haha. More complex than editing your (posted)
BTW: You can watch the harvard video here: http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html [harvard.edu]
That was a superb animation. I watched it for the first time 3 months ago. Another version goes with no commentaries but only music and you can find it from Youtube.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
The Copyright Act allows the copyright holder to choose between actual damages and statutory damages, which may be as much as $150,000 per infringement. Furthermore, it is not out of the question that punitive damages will be awarded if the infringement is intentional and egregious, which is arguably the case here. Traditionally, it has been assumed that punitive damages are not available for copyright infringement, but courts have awarded them in some recent cases.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the $150,000 is a maximum, and it is available only if the infringement is intentional. If the infringement is unintentional, the maximum is $30,000. An additional financial threat is that the court may award costs and attorneys' fees to the copyright holder. Statutory damages do not depend on actual losses - that is precisely what distinguishes them from actual damages. Critics have been arguing that the damages demanded in the RIAA suits are excessive in comparison to the value of the songs, but at least as far as the law is concerned, those arguments are beside the point. The very purpose of allowing the plaintiff to select statutory damages is to break the connection to actual damages. Congress may have made a bad choice of policy, and there is an argument that the statutory damages allowed are in at least some cases so excessive as to be unconstitutional, but as the law now stands, in the United States, a copyright holder unable to demonstrate significant actual damages still stands to receive substantial statutory damages.
Re:Uh, fair use? (Score:5, Informative)
It would be right if we found the video without any narrative buried deep in the remainings of an ancient civilisation or something else. Then both narratives would be part of a discourse how to interpret the video. Then the video would be the raw scientific data, and both narratives had their rightful purpose.
Here it is different. The video is in no way raw data. It was choosen, cut, mounted together to help explaining something. In this case the narrative is the core of the video, and the pictures are merely there to illustrate. As someone who routinely draws comics as a hobby I always was playing with the possibilitiy to erase all words in a comic strip and then fill in something else which narrates a completely different story. Misinterpretation of a sequence of pictures is thus no "scientific discourse", it is always possible. At most it shows that the pictures alone are not enough to make the case for what Harvard wanted to explain with the video (but Harvard added the narrative anyway because the knew it was not enough). If the Institute wanted to show that, they might have a case, albeit a weak one.
But in this case it is just making a derivative work of someone else's work without a) getting a permission and b) without attributing it correctly. This is purely a copyright case, nothing else.
Re:Uh, fair use? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, with citing the correct source. Without it, it is plagiarism, which can easily mean the end of a scientific career.
Re:Uh, fair use? (Score:3, Informative)
Discovery Institute didn't do so. They took a prefabricated sequence of pictures. They didn't change their order. Their narrative might be their own and probably is entitled to its own copyright. But everything else violates Harvard's copyright to the collage of pictures.
Re:Not merely copyright violation (Score:4, Informative)
I stand by my claim that the DI misrepresented and distorted the original content of the video, precisely because the original narration does not make any statement about how these biochemical mechanisms came into being, and because it is reasonable to presume that the video's content was developed by scientists, they could not legitimately believe that intelligent design furnishes a valid scientific framework for these mechanisms' existence. The logical conclusion is that the subsequent use is a distortion.
Furthermore, to compare this misrepresentation to an AMV on YouTube may be valid from a legal standpoint, but invalid from a sociopolitical standpoint. For instance, you would not want the media to similarly play fast and loose with content they did not author or to fail to cite or document their sources (though quite unfortunately, they often do--hence the introduction of the word "truthiness" in our modern lexicon). It is not reasonable to hold all such forms of content manipulation to the same standard, as those with a background in journalism and/or art history could point out.
I find it interesting that so few people seem to have a problem with the failure to make the proper attribution, and the implications thereof. There is no reason not to, unless the intent is to mask the true authorship of the original work. That this is something that happens on YouTube does not make it less egregious, or any more justifiable. Perhaps these increasingly lax attitudes towards plagiarism is an unfortunate reflection of the great ease with which information is replicated and manipulated nowadays, and the corresponding difficulty in determining the original source.
Re:Slashdot complaining about copyright violations (Score:5, Informative)
The majority view here on Slashdot is:
Does that answer your question?
-:sigma.SB
Re:Slashdot complaining about copyright violations (Score:3, Informative)
The GP said
"Copyright violation...
You said "This is not true." then said nothing about HOW it is not true. You began to attempt to attack software piracy. However, I am still baffled as to why you believe copyright violation is a good thing.
Also, you really should spend a little more time in the real world, and also do a little research before you decide to refute other people's statements. The RIAA have sued the parents of children that have downloaded material, and while the children might have done something wrong, the parents certainly did not. "Single mom Tanya Andersen, a defendant in a previous lawsuit brought by the RIAA, was one of the first to have her case dismissed with prejudice (it cannot be refiled at a later date)." (you can look that quote up, research...).
There's More. "In a lawsuit filed in January (2005), the RIAA accused 83-year old Gertrude Walton of sharing over 700 pop, rock and rap songs under the alias 'smittenedkitten.' What the RIAA didn't know is that Walton had passed away in December following a long illness. Her daughter, Robin Chianumba, has lived with Walton for the past 17 years and told the Charleston Gazette that her mother refused to even have a computer in the house."
So there is MORE than ample proof that the RIAA have sued innocent people. Get your facts straight.
ID arguments fall apart under their own theory (Score:5, Informative)
ID arguments fall apart under their own theory. Their theory basically states that some things in nature are too complex to have come about randomly, therefore someone must have designed them. It's notable that this is a logical argument, not a scientific one. There is no testable statement here. The only valid test would be to put an empty jar in a room and wait for "the designer" to place a new form of life in it. I haven't heard of any successful experiments of this type :).
Their current argument though would look at a tree's cells and all of the complexities that go on and say that there is no way it could have evolved. ID just says evolution is false, it doesn't try to explain anything itself. Take just the leaf of a tree though. If you just look at it, you would say someone designed it, placed everything exactly where it was and made this beautiful design. If you know anything about biology, or if you just watch a leaf grow from spring to summer, you will see that it wasn't placed there, it grew out of the tree. ID proponents would say that is hogwash. There's no way that a seed could turn into a tree. Just look at them, the seed is so small and the tree is a complex structure with many types of cells. Someone had to design each leaf and place it there, there's no way a single seed could become a whole tree with all the different leaves.
ID proponents don't claim this that I know of because they can see it happen. Everyone can observe a tree growing and we know that it ends up the way it is because of a natural process that begins with the DNA encoded in the seed and that is modified by the environment the tree grows in. They can't 'see' evolution occur so they dismiss it in favor of something written in a book thousands of years ago with no proof that most of the world's population doesn't even believe. In reality, we've observed DNA mutations and even speciation events. They can't comprehend the size of the Earth and the billions of years that it has existed, so they claim evolutionists just "throw billions of years at the problem" to explain it.
My favorite is when an atheist in a debate claimed that our large brain size was proof of evolution because prior to modern medicine, 20% of women died in childbirth due to the size of the babies' heads. The "true believers" claimed this was proof that natural selection was false because it caused the woman to die. If a larger brain gave even a 10% advantage to survival though, it would prove to be a total benefit to the species, and we can see now it has worked since we've become the dominant species on the planet due largely to our intelligence. If you look at it from a designer's perspective though, there is no plausible reason not to just make the woman's hips a little wider. From an evolutionist's perspective, the change just hasn't happened yet. Now of course there is little selective pressure since we have modern medicine and C-Sections available.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It was planned. (Score:4, Informative)
...and here someone pointed out earlier that the whole point of the FSM was not to be insulting...
Tell ya what. I'll happily buy that when the FSM can be used in a discussion thread WITHOUT someone slamming the spiritual beliefs of others.
Note: I did not use the word "religion". Big difference 'tween being religious and bein' spiritual.
As for the CR violation? Take 'em to court jus' like anyone else. Get a C&D order. This isn't news... unless you were LOOKING for a flame-fest 'tween two opposing sides.
Re:It was planned. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/ [venganza.org]
Why is this stupid? Because if ID is correct, it allows for FSM as much as Christianity or any other religion that involves a creator. Asking ID to be taught in schools does not entail teaching any specific religion. To make this point clearer - ID is an overarching project that encompasses many religions and materialist scenarios - Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, ancient Egyptian beliefs, FSM, and more. So FSM is a *subset* of all the possible frameworks if ID is correct. So to ask that FSM be taught alongside ID is to show a category misunderstanding. ID does not stand in contrast with FSM, but rather FSM falls under ID (as does directed panspermia and other non-religious creation scenarios). Teaching ID in schools would *not* mean teaching a specific idea, such as Christianity, with it.