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Letter In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub

Came across this letter online and wanted to save it here for future reference.

In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub

In Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s tale the Little Prince meets a businessman who accumulates stars with the sole purpose of being able to buy more stars. The Little Prince is perplexed. He owns only a flower, which he waters every day. Three volcanoes, which he cleans every week. “It is of some use to my volcanoes, and it is of some use to my flower, that I own them,” he says, “but you are of no use to the stars that you own”.

There are many businessmen who own knowledge today. Consider Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher, whose 37% profit margin¹ stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty. Elsevier owns some of the largest databases of academic material, which are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university of the global north, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”² For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers, particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, journal articles are priced such that they prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the world, and render it a token of privilege.³

Elsevier has recently filed a copyright infringement suit in New York against Science Hub and Library Genesis claiming millions of dollars in damages.⁴ This has come as a big blow, not just to the administrators of the websites but also to thousands of researchers around the world for whom these sites are the only viable source of academic materials. The social media, mailing lists and IRC channels have been filled with their distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications.

Even as the New York District Court was delivering its injunction, news came of the entire editorial board of highly-esteemed journal Lingua handing in their collective resignation, citing as their reason the refusal by Elsevier to go open access and give up on the high fees it charges to authors and their academic institutions. As we write these lines, a petition is doing the rounds demanding that Taylor & Francis doesn’t shut down Ashgate⁵, a formerly independent humanities publisher that it acquired earlier in 2015. It is threatened to go the way of other small publishers that are being rolled over by the growing monopoly and concentration in the publishing market. These are just some of the signs that the system is broken. It devalues us, authors, editors and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access⁶.

We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and at a much lower cost to society. But closed access’s monopoly over academic publishing, its spectacular profits and its central role in the allocation of academic prestige trump the public interest. Commercial publishers effectively impede open access, criminalize us, prosecute our heroes and heroines, and destroy our libraries, again and again. Before Science Hub and Library Genesis there was Library.nu or Gigapedia; before Gigapedia there was textz.com; before textz.com there was little; and before there was little there was nothing. That’s what they want: to reduce most of us back to nothing. And they have the full support of the courts and law to do exactly that.⁷

In Elsevier’s case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: “simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest”⁸. Alexandra Elbakyan’s original plea put the stakes much higher: “If Elsevier manages to shut down our projects or force them into the darknet, that will demonstrate an important idea: that the public does not have the right to knowledge.”

We demonstrate daily, and on a massive scale, that the system is broken. We share our writing secretly behind the backs of our publishers, circumvent paywalls to access articles and publications, digitize and upload books to libraries. This is the other side of 37% profit margins: our knowledge commons grows in the fault lines of a broken system. We are all custodians of knowledge, custodians of the same infrastructures that we depend on for producing knowledge, custodians of our fertile but fragile commons. To be a custodian is, de facto, to download, to share, to read, to write, to review, to edit, to digitize, to archive, to maintain libraries, to make them accessible. It is to be of use to, not to make property of, our knowledge commons.

More than seven years ago Aaron Swartz, who spared no risk in standing up for what we here urge you to stand up for too, wrote: “We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”⁹

We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices.

Share this letter – read it in public – leave it in the printer. Share your writing – digitize a book – upload your files. Don’t let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries – care for the metadata – care for the backup. Water the flowers – clean the volcanoes.

30 November 2015

Dušan Barok, Josephine Berry, Bodó Balázs, Sean Dockray, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anthony Iles, Lawrence Liang, Sebastian Lütgert, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Marcell Mars, spideralex, Tomislav Medak, Dubravka Sekulić, Femke Snelting…

Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” PLoS ONE 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.,
“The Obscene Profits of Commercial Scholarly Publishers.” svpow.com. Accessed November 30, 2015. ↩

Sample, Ian. “Harvard University Says It Can’t Afford Journal Publishers’ Prices.” The Guardian, April 24, 2012, sec. Science. theguardian.com. ↩

“Academic Paywalls Mean Publish and Perish – Al Jazeera English.” Accessed November 30, 2015. aljazeera.com. ↩

“Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s ‘Illegal’ Copyright Paywalls.” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com. ↩

“Save Ashgate Publishing.” Change.org. Accessed November 30, 2015. change.org. ↩

“The Cost of Knowledge.” Accessed November 30, 2015. thecostofknowledge.com. ↩

In fact, with the TPP and TTIP being rushed through the legislative process, no domain registrar, ISP provider, host or human rights organization will be able to prevent copyright industries and courts from criminalizing and shutting down websites “expeditiously”. ↩

“Court Orders Shutdown of Libgen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub.” TorrentFreak. Accessed November 30, 2015. torrentfreak.com. ↩

“Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Internet Archive. Accessed November 30, 2015. archive.org. ↩

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Mathias Klang

Humor as Disobedience

The class today was on the use of humor in political protest. Last week we discussed the fundamentals of civil disobedience and this week the students presented different examples of the uses of humor.

So the basics of disobedience are usually described as having different components to differentiate them from “just” lawlessness. For example H. A. Bedau argued in Civil Disobedience in Focus that in order for disobedience to be legitimate it should be

“committed openly…non-violently…and conscientiously…within the framework of the rule of law…with the intention of frustrating or protesting some law, policy or decision…of the government.”

As the examples of humor show, they fail many of these components and do not pass as civil disobedience. In most cases they are either not breaking any rule, regulation, policy, or social norm and in other cases they are not protesting the ruling authority or government.

However, the examples demonstrate the complexity of society by realizing that it is not only the government that regulates and that disobedience need not only be the breaking of rules.

The presentations today included The Pink Chaddi Campaign where Indian women sent pink underwear to the leader of an orthodox Hindu group to protest it’s misogynistic worldview. The De Grote Donor Show ashocking critique of popular culture intended to raise awareness about organ donation. The John Howard Ladies Auxiliary Club, a group of performance actors who adopted characters parodying 1950s Australian housewives and claimed to be the Prime Minister’s fan club. They would use his own conservatism against him in their parodies.

In The Snatchel Project the goal is: “Let’s make a uterus or VJJ* for each male rep in congress! If they have their own, they can leave ours alone!”. Participants knit or crochet female reproductive organs and send them to legislators. The Barbie Liberation Organization hacked talking Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and switched their recorded messages. This would make Barbie say “vengeance is mine” while G.I. Joe would exclaim that “The beach is the place for summer.” The goal was to show that gender stereotypes are just that – stereotypes.

From the Government Free VJJ Flickr Page

The sheer variation of these activist campaigns ensured that we had interesting and lively discussions ranging from fears connected with organ donation to misogyny in Australia. A lively class indeed.

An interesting aspect of looking at these studies was to refer them back to the theories. Where they political actions since they were aimed at non-political players? Where they disobedience when they were not breaking any rules? What we could see was that the activists (even if they may not all have defined themselves as such) set about non-conforming to social norms and protesting the message of a dominant player.

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Digital Divides & Net Neutrality: Notes from a lecture

As today is the last week before the Scottish referendum which will decide whether Scotland will become an independent country I could not help but begin the lecture with a shout out to this coming monumental date. I find it hard to believe that the world is talking about anything else.

But the real point of today’s class was to talk about digital divides and net neutrality. To begin this I began by explaining how the Internet became this amazing thing it is today. We tend to take it’s coolness for granted because it is so cool (I recognize that this is circular reasoning but that is the way it is often explained).

One of the unexplained reasons the Internet became cool depends on the business model that is used. In the early days we paid for the time we were connected. This pay-as-you-go model is great but it does have a dampening effect. Since you are constantly paying the impetus is to be quick. Being quick means that the content will be light and fast to be usable.

This business model is the same as the telephone model has been for most of it’s history. We paid per minute and by distance. We were taught to be brief and idle chatting was discouraged. This is also because the infrastructure was originally highly wasteful and could only serve one user per line.

If the telephone had developed into a monthly charge instead, we could have seen a great deal more innovation and use of the system we could have created the Internet much much earlier. This counterfactual is not totally strange. The early ideas for the telephone included such oddities as dial-up concerts. Such as the one reported in Scientific American, (February 28, 1891):

In a lecture recently delivered in the Town Hall at Newton, Mass., Mr. Pickernell described the methods employed in the transmission of music by telephone. His remarks were very forcibly illustrated by the reception in the lecture hall of music transmitted over the long distance lines from the telephone building, at No. 18 Cortlandt Street, New York, and our engraving, made from a photograph taken at the time, shows the arrangement of the performers.

Scientific American, February 28, 1891

But as we all know this was not the way the telephone evolved. The Internet on the other hand did move in that direction. Rather quickly we moved from dial-up modems to fixed connections. Speed was important – but even more important was the fact that the user never had to worry about the time she was online. Downloading large files, streaming, idle browsing and most all of our online lives stems from the point where we stopped worrying about the cost of access to the Internet.

Another point that needs to be stressed is that we often confuse the Internet, the Web and what we do on our mobile devices. Put very simply the Internet is the cables and servers the infrastructure upon which several applications (such as email, netflix and the Web run upon). What we do on our mobile devices is mostly using apps which run on the Internet (but not necessarily the web).

So while the web which was developed by Tim Berners Lee became huge because he chose to give the system away without trying to patent or close it. It is now shrinking because we are becoming more dependent upon our mobile devices. For the longest time we said “the Internet” when we really meant “the Web” and now we say “the Web” when we really mean “the Internet” (via apps on our devices).

This may seem to be pedantic distinctions but they are important as each of these technologies have different strengths and weaknesses and different affordances and control mechanisms.

Once this was established we looked at this map illustrating:

What you’re looking at is a map of nearly every device that was connected to the internet on August 2. Or, at least, a map of ones that responded to a ping request from John Matherly, an internet cartographer. Motherboard

When we say everybody uses the Internet this is the everybody to which we are referring. The large dark areas are those without this, for us, basic technology. Additionally there are small places with more connectivity than the areas we would normally see as technology dense. The map also raises interesting questions about divisions created by culture and language and the problems of measurement when countries such as China are behind a firewall.

We also looked at an array of charts illustrating OECD statistics on broadband penetration per capita, average monthly subscription price, and average download speeds.

The USA has an average broadband penetration among OECD countries but it also has the highest number of total internet subscribers by far seen in absolute numbers.

In order to have some form of consensus for our discussion on the digital divide I put forward this description:

… a gap between those who have ready access to information and communication technology and the skills to make use of those technology and those who do not have the access or skills to use those same technologies within a geographic area, society or community. It is an economic and social inequality between groups of persons.

The factors that are persistently pointed to as being the root causes of the digital divide are

Cost (technology and connection)
Know-how (how to connect, how to use devices, what to do when something goes wrong, overcoming cultural divides etc)
Recognizing the benefit

The latter is very interesting as most users do not need to explain why they benefit but non-users manage to make their lives work without access. It is difficult to demonstrate to non-users that they would benefit from using the technology. Indeed that they would benefit so much that it is worth struggling to overcome the barriers of cost and know-how.

Then we moved the discussion over to the Pew research report African Americans and Technology Use, which showed

African Americans trail whites by seven percentage points when it comes to overall internet use (87% of whites and 80% of blacks are internet users), and by twelve percentage points when it comes to home broadband adoption (74% of whites and 62% of blacks have some sort of broadband connection at home). At the same time, blacks and whites are on more equal footing when it comes to other types of access, especially on mobile platforms.

All things being equal there should be no difference in technology use. And yet there is a gap of seven percentage points. Considering most countries desire to transfer more business and services online this is a worrying number of outsiders. Remember, both groups should have users who don’t see a need for the technology – this gap is not about them.

When it came to smartphone ownership the difference was not significant (53% of whites and 56% of blacks) but I found this interesting taken in conjunction with the earlier numbers. Were some users choosing mobile devices over broadband? What were the consequences of this? Stephanie Chen was interviewed in Salon

“You can’t do your homework on a smartphone; you can’t help your kids with their homework on a smartphone; you can’t write your résumé on a smartphone. You can’t do any of that on a smartphone… As a test, I went through the process and tried to apply for a job at Walmart on a phone. It was an arduous process.”

Once again it is vital to remember that each device has it’s affordances that enable and discourage behavior.

Following this we touched briefly on the concepts of digital natives, digital immigrants and digital tourists. I can only refer back to an earlier rant of mine on the subject:

During the discussions one of the topics that came up was the digital divide which is claimed to exist between young and old (whatever do these epitaphs mean?) and then it was only natural to bring up the horrible term digital natives, digital immigrants and digital turists. All these terms were popularized by Marc Prensky and are completely horrific. And of course very popular. There were voices of reason among the crowd but at the same time the catchy phrase seemed to win over intelligent discussion.

There are several problems with the metaphor, not to mention the built in racism. In most languages, calling someone a native smacks of arrogance, a touch of racism and good old fashioned colonialism.

Who is the native? So who is the native and how does one become one? Obviously the idea here is that the youth of today are all tech-savvy and understand technology while the older generation is good at saying stuff like “I remember when…” and handling analog technology. Seriously what a load of dog doodoo. The fact that we lack common areas of interest is not a digital divide. Young people tend to have different tastes in music, love, hobbies, work, films, books than older people. Even Beethoven’s father probably complained at his sons taste in music.

Are they a group? The young are not a homogeneous group, but then again the question could be put forward if homogeneous groups actually exist at all? Does the Englishman really exist? What is it the natives are supposed to understand? This is the biggest problem with the metaphor. Yes, there are hoards of young folk who can easily send hundreds of text messages per day but does that identify them as digital? Does this mean that they are fundamentally different from those who can hardly use the mobile telephones?

The problem is that the idea of the digital native seems to be that they are (1) comfortable using all digital technology and, (2) understand all digital technology. This is most obviously wrong. The ability to be on Facebook does not prepare you for editing wikipedia, blogging or twitter. The ability to use wikipedia has nothing to do with being popular on twitter. And none of these abilities have anything to do with the ability to use the most of the functions in the simplest word processors.

The understanding of technology, how it works, what it means – in addition to its social, economic and cultural impact is quite often totally lost on these so-called natives. I mean no disrespect (even though saying this usually makes things worse) but being an enthusiastic user has no relation to understanding technology.

Metaphors are supposed to exist to help us understand complex ideas. When they do not fulfill this basic purpose they are useless or worse harmful to our understanding. A misguided metaphor is worse than no metaphor at all. And the concept of digital natives does not aid understanding – it only creates barriers.

It was then time to deal with net neutrality and in order to do this in a more entertaining manner I showed a part of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Net Neutrality (HBO)

And finally closed by appealing to them to go and read up on net neutrality, and in particular, check out the website Battle for the Net since there is still time for those who feel it to be important to react and to show politicians that the open net is something ordinary people are passionate about.

Here are the slides I used for this presentation:

Digital Divides and Net Neutrality from Mathias Klang

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Laughing or crying at Le Corbusier: Every action has consequences

If we were to ignore his impact on a generation of architects and urban planners, we can also turn to the furniture line created by himself and his designers and introduced in the 1920s and 1930s. Gorgeous creations of chrome tubes and leather cushions that have been featured in magazines and films for decades, usually signifying luxury or the future but not always. Here is an example of one of his chairs in The Big Lebowski (Ethan Coen, 1998).

For designers, hipsters, and furniture nerds this is all great. But for us copyright geeks, it takes a lot longer before it all begins to get interesting. Le Corbusier died in 1965, but naturally his designs and thoughts are still influential several decades on. We think differently about design because of him. This is all well and good.

The part that makes it difficult to know whether to laugh or cry is the news that Le Corbusier’s heirs (and the holders of his copyright today), after discovering that some of their relative’s work was included in Getty Images enormous photo collection, have sued Getty for making the images available online. The copyright holders won the case: Fondation Le Corbusier v. Getty Images (Paris Court of Appeals, Pole 5, 2nd chamber June 13, 2014). Read more about it over at The 1709 Blog.

Copyright is important and the images involved in the case were not pictures of other things with some furniture in the background. They were clearly identifiable as Le Corbusier, and in the foreground. Additionally the photos did not make any reference to Le Corbusier as having anything to do with the chairs!

So the Le Corbusier family gained some money and can argue that they defended the family honor. But to what expense? Since Getty Images has 80000 images online, will they have to act in some way to prevent other families eager to profit from the remains of their dead ancestors?

Will cases like this scare other archives away from digitizing images and making them available online? The aftereffects of this sort of thing has the potential to drag us back from the cultural bonanza of online archives. Today we go online and find what we want – should the relatives of dead designers have the power to prevent this?

Does sharing the same DNA as a creator make you well suited to decide the fate of her creations?

This post originally appeared here.

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Becoming Bland: Popularity isn’t Innovation

Something has been happening at Twitter. There are rumblings of changes and re-designs. First there was the new changes that made it more “photo-centric”, then there was the talk of removing the @ reply and today the buzz is the new design making it all look more like Facebook. The photo changes have been made to challenge instagram and the re-design is to become more networky and challenge Facebook?

At the same time Facebook has been attempting to challenge Twitter and online chat with its recent exorbitant purchase of Whatsapp. Facebook’s launch of paper has been an attempt to take the market from news aggregation sites like digg.com and, more importantly, apps like Currents, Flipboard and Zite. Annoyingly, the innovative Zite has been bought by the excellent Flipboard which will decrease the diversity. Combining two nice things does not necessarily make it better.

In similar news Dropbox acquires and absorbs reading app Readmill but this is done to shut the app down.

Yahoo has announced that it wants to challenge YouTube with its own service. Yahoo also owns Flickr which has been slowly evolving. Flickr’s changes to it’s layout have made it progressively more difficult to download images and find information about the licensing which made the tool such a treasure for the open content community. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting protest about this yesterday (Restoring CC attribution to Flickr, because Yahoo broke it).

Grumpy Cat builds a GNU Internet by Frerk Meyer CC BY SA

So this isn’t really anything new. But it does point to a level of stagnation in the online world. When was the last time something really new, innovative and exciting happened? When the tech world is using more lawyers than developers you know that something is up. Instead of making really good products that many people like there is a race to the bottom in order to create as many similarly bland products that few people have the energy to hate.

In politics this is usually seen when previously well defined parties race towards the middle ground in order to gain the most votes. While this may be a successful policy to win elections it does tend to create bland politics and eventually leading to a great sense of disenchantedment (this might not really be a word but you know what I mean). Once all parties have lost their identities and voters have become unhappy the field is opened up for the growth of distasteful radical politicians spouting extremist views.

How does this work in tech?

The race to similarity and the priority of lawsuits over development creates a fall into blandness. Trying to make everybody happy will make nobody happy. This may open up the chance for new devices, apps and services to come forth. Well that would be the theory but in practice the market will be blocked by patents, fenced in with copyrights and guarded by monoliths that purchase and destroy all that is new and exciting.

Or maybe I’m just grumpy today?

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Why Nobody Cites Your Articles

Most academics will know that papers are produced and not read. The whole academic publishing system is geared to the production, and not the consumption, of text. The off-the-cuff sad joke used to be that only 8 people would ever read your work (and that included the reviewers and your mother). But it’s actually sadder than that. Lokman I Meho begins The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis with the chilling words:

It is a sobering fact that some 90% of papers that have been published in academic journals are never cited. Indeed, as many as 50% of papers are never read by anyone other than their authors, referees and journal editors.

Hours of intense labor and scientific rigor to produce a text that nobody reads. It’s disheartening. This sad labor is not limited to academic work, there are unfortunately many fields were the output is of little or no consequence and has no impact on its surroundings. But this is a sad comfort for academia.

Academic work is naturally limited and focused. If you want thousands of readers you are in the wrong job. Be happy that you are read and cited. If most articles are never read or cited then the fact that you are cited should be valued much more than it is. Also what about the cases where something is said in passing on social media? Shouldn’t that count for something? Probably not. How would a tenure committee value a tweet?

The real issue is that most articles that are produced are happily dumped into closed information silos. Academics are all too happy to sign away the rights to their articles to the publishers who promptly lock them away – in order to profit by steadily increasing the prices (serials crisis) they charge libraries to subscribe to the journals the academics need in order to publish more articles. The motivation for academics to participate in this system is that our careers are built on publishing in the “right” journals.

In order to change this system the ways in which academic careers are determined need to be re-appraised. The production of knowledge and publication are important for science but this cannot mean that this production must be in the “right” journal. The appraisal of the scientific contribution cannot be tied to the brand name of a specific journal but must be about the article content.

In the meantime we must be more wary about handing away our rights, more careful to ensure that we can use and re-use our own texts. This requires strong academics and strong universities in order to stand up to the strong publishers. We must not let things like this happen:

Academic publisher Elsevier has been targeting open access websites and universities that are posting their own academic articles online with takedown notices for copyright infringement. (Wired Magazine, December 17, 2013)

Finally, by maintaining the rights to our own articles and by ensuring they are available to readers outside the academic sphere the knowledge in the articles can be spread beyond the narrow confines of the closed information silos. The knowledge in the articles might be read by more people and maybe, maybe, maybe be cited.

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Open Access & Science

This is another post for Commons Machinery

In the 17^th century, radical ideas were blooming and with these ideas came the need to share them so that they would benefit the largest amount of people. The first scientific journals (the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) were begun in 1665 to systematically report experimental progress.

This sentiment was also echoed in the first modern piece of copyright legislation: the Statute of Anne from 1710, which recognized that the power of ownership over text had to be moved from the publisher to the author,“…for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books…”

This encouragement was necessary as it was recognized that such books were important for society as a whole. Their importance was not to increase the stature of the writer but to increase available knowledge in society. Copyright was developed for the spread of learning.

In academia today, it seems we are in a slow state of decline from these principles. The Open Access movement does provide a sense of hope, but, in general, the distribution of knowledge in academia today is a sad state of affairs.

The cost of scientific journals is on the rise (the serials crisis). This not only limits individuals from accessing scientific literature but has driven the prices so high that many prestigious university libraries are concerned about their ability to keep them in stock. In 2012, Harvard University published a memorandum on their concerns about journal publishers’ prices. This is the seat of privilege arguing: “We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive.”

In addition to this, the limitations placed on copying and re-use not only limit an article’s readership from accessing and using material but also limits the authors from sharing or re-using the material they themselves created. In December 2013, the major science publisher Elsevier began threatening academics posting their own papers online with legal action (article in Wired).

All hope is not lost! Open access is the way to change this. Please watch the talented Jorge Cham of PhD Comics explain open access in this illustrated video: Open Access Explained! By PHD Comics

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Posted on March 11, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Free Getty Images have take backsies

It feels like a good day when you wake up to the news that Getty Images is making 35 million images free to use. That’s nice… or is it?

The embedd tool is only will allow users to (WSJ)

..include images on websites, such as non-commercial WordPress blogs. The eligible images also come with buttons for Tumblr and Twitter, where a link to the image can be shared. (The image itself doesn’t appear on Twitter, however.)

The obvious question about this is the elusive term non-commercial – attempting to define what is and isn’t commercial is a minefield. But the real question here is one of control. Poynter, referring to the Verge, picks up this point in their reporting of the release. Getty is not giving something for nothing and what they will have is control. Previously images were used without clearing copyright but by providing easy embedding code users will be encouraged to use the images in the ways in which Getty desires.

The new money comes because, once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information.

The terms of service makes the control pretty clear. Under termination they write:

Notwithstanding any of these Site Terms, Getty Images reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your account and/or to block your use of the Site.

If they don’t like you, you don’t get to use the images any more. If you have built up a following based on images they provide – and by doing this provide them with viewers/customers/revenue you still have no rights to use their images if they decide not to share with you any more. As they are embedded images they don’t even have to demand that you take the images down.

This is conditional freedom. This is not a gift but a conditional exchange where those who embed images become the advance marketers of Getty. We have all seen this, this is classic social media thinking. We should know by now:

If you are not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Or an unpaid part of the sales team.

Lets be clear. Getty images has the right to do what they please with these images. I have no problem with their approach. I just want to point out the difference between giving something away while keeping the right to take it back and giving something away.

Compare this with the 100s of millions (if not billions) of images available under Creative Commons licenses. Here the exchange is free and non-revokable. If I use an image that a photographer has licensed under CC. I can use that image forever.

A Big Appetite by Julie Falk CC BY NC

Now this is a free lunch.

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Mathias Klang

Structural disincentives and Innovation

This is not a blog about business administration but after reading an article about the demise of Microsoft and the Stack Rating system, I needed to vent. This is the most horrible and destructive staff system I’ve ever heard of (this side of an actual whip).

The use of stack ranking actually creates a structural disincentive to be creative and nurturing a team spirit. It might be rather good for created fear and paranoia. But these are going to help innovation.

Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair explains stack ranking:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

Slate Magazine sums it up nicely: So while Google was encouraging its employees to spend 20 percent of their time to work on ideas that excited them personally, Ballmer was inadvertently encouraging his to spend a good chunk of their time playing office politics. Why try to outrun the bear when you can just tie your co-workers’ shoelaces?

Posted on August 26, 2013 by mklang