[615] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Intellectual Property and its Discontents
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stevan Harnad)
Mon Jun 29 12:26:16 1992
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1992 11:21:27 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@Princeton.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@mitvma.mit.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
This topic has come up before, and no doubt will do so again and again.
Here is an extract from an earlier discussion in COMMED (ftp instructions
for retrieving the entire file -- psyc.background4 -- appear at the
end of the message.
Gerald M. Phillips, Professor, Speech Communication, Pennsylvania State
University (GMP@PSUVM.BITNET) wrote on Commed:
> Plagiarism is a major concern in using an electronic network. I am
> hesitant to share material that might be useful because my copyrights are
> not protected on this network. I enjoy the chitchat effect, but I have
> told several people who have contacted me about my "on-line" course, that
> I would be happy to share articles or have them come out an observe. I would
> not attempt to offer advice using this medium. It would be guaranteed to
> be half-baked and inapposite.
I have two replies here; one objective and quite decisive, the other a
somewhat subjective observation: There are ways to implement peer
discussion that will preserve priority as safely as the ordinary mail,
telephone and word-processor media (none completely immune to
techno-vandalism these days, by the way) to which we already entrust our
prepublication ideas and findings. I'll discuss these in the future.
As food for thought, consider that it would be simple to implement a
network with read/write access only for a group of peers in a given
specialty, where every posting is seen by everyone who matters in the
specialty (and is archived for the record, to boot). These are the people
who ASSIGN the priorities. A wider circle might have read-only access,
and perhaps one of them might try (and even succeed) to purloin an
idea and publish it as his own -- either in a low-level print
journal or a low-level electronic group. So what? The peers saw it
first, and know whence it came, and where and when, with the archive
to confirm it (printed out in hard copy, if you insist!). That's the
INTRINSIC purpose of scholarly priority. If some enterprising
vita-stuffer up for promotion at New Age College pries the covers off
my book and substitutes his own, that's not a strike against the
printed medium, is it?
Now the subjective point: It seems paradoxical, to say the least, to
be worried about word glut and quality decline at the same time as
being preoccupied with priority and plagiarism. Here is some more food
for thought: The few big ideas that there are will not fail to be
attributed to their true source as a result of the net. As to the many
little ones (the "minimal publishable units," or what have you), well, I
suppose that a scholar can spend his time trying to protect those too --
or he can be less niggardly with them in the hope that something bigger
might be spawned by the interaction.
It's all a matter of scale. I'm inclined to think that for the really
creative thinker, ideas are not in short supply. It's the tree that
bears the fruit that matters: "He who steals my apples, steals trash,"
or something like that. The rival anecdote is that Einstein was asked
in the fifties by some tiresome journalist -- a harbinger of our
self-help/new-age era -- what activity he was usually engaged in when
he got his creative ideas (shaving? showering? walking? sleeping?), and
he replied that he really couldn't say, because he had only had one or
two creative ideas in his entire lifetime... (Nor was he particularly
secretive about them, I might add, engaging in intense scholarly
correspondence about them with his peers, most of whom could not even
grasp, much less pass them off as their own.)
> And please address the issue of those of us who make our living out of the
> printed word and fear plagiarism above earthquakes and forest fires.
> Gerald M. Phillips, Pennsylvania State University
I imagine that a different system of values and expectations will be
engendered by the net. One may have to make one's reputation
increasingly by being a fertile collaborator rather than a prolific
monad. I think interactive productivity ("interproductivity") will turn
out to be just as viable, answerable and rewardable a way of establishing
one's intellectual territory as the old way; it's just that the
territory will be much less exclusive, more overlapping and
interdependent. That's the cumulative direction in which inquiry has been
heading all along anyway.
As to words themselves: I think it will be possible to protect them
just as well as in the old media. The ones who are really able to use
the language (like the ones who have really new ideas or findings) will
still be a tiny minority, as they are now and always will be, and we'll
know even better who they are and what they have written. It'll be
easier to steal a few of their screenfuls for lowly use, but, as
always, it will be impossible to steal their source. As to the rest --
marginal ideas and marginal prose -- I can't really work up a sense of
urgency about them; it seems to me, however, that it will be just as
easy as before to make sure they get their dubious due, in terms of
their official standing in the two-dimensional hierarchy [Harnad 1990].
Stevan Harnad
Department of Psychology
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544
harnad@princeton.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------
Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum
of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in
Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991).
Harnad, S. (1991) Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the
Means of Production of Knowledge. Public-Access Computer Systems Review
2 (1): 39 - 53 (also reprinted in PACS Annual Review Volume 2
1992; and in R. D. Mason (ed.) Computer Conferencing: The Last Word. Beach
Holme Publishers, 1992; and in A. L. Okerson (ed.) Directory of
Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 2nd
edition. Washington, DC, Association of Research Libraries, Office of
Scientific & Academic Publishing, 1992).
Harnad, S. (1992) Interactive Publication: Extending the
American Physical Society's Discipline-Specific Model for Electronic
Publishing. Serials Review, Special Issue on Economics Models for
Electronic Publishing, pp. 58 - 61.
The above files are available by anonymous ftp from
hostname: princeton.edu
directory: pub/harnad
filenames harnad90.skywriting
harnad91.postgutenberg
harnad92.interactivpub
psyc.background4 (commed discussion)
