'Hands off our books, content miners! Those aren't cheap'

Allowing people to use computers to 'mine' vast banks of copyrighted material would damage the economy, the UK Publishers Association has said. It wants to block an exception to copyright law for the practice. A government-commissioned review of intellectual property (IP) laws earlier this year recommended that researchers …

[Anonymous Coward]

Legalised mass theft?

'Hargreaves also said that the UK should "press at EU level" for an exception to be introduced into copyright laws for "text mining and data analytics for commercial use".'

Ah, for commercial use - I see. "All your book are belong to us", then.

[Thomas 18]

"platforms would collapse under the technological weight of crawler-bots"

The internet is like a series of tubes you see.

I'm guessing Richard Mollet has never heard of a captcha

[Gerrit Hoekstra]

Must I buy a bookcase full for that one page relevant to my research?

... or spend days in book shops looking for the right book, while the owners grumble and tut-tut behind my back?

Pretty poor arguments from the Publishers:

* Not making useful information available in searches will actually disadvantage the UK - there is no other way to scan and manage our huge and important industrial knowlege base.

* Content aggregators are perfectly able to provide searched-for content in the correct context - usually in the context of the inputted search criteria!

* Reasearchers are clever enough that they don't need mumsy guidance to the information from the publishers

Publishers need to accept that all information will eventually be aggregated through search engines. If theirs is not there, they will simply be ignored unless they want to been seen as keepers of exotic, ancient and unspoken knowlege, akin to the secrets of the pyramids. They must move on from their (literally!) medieval revenue model and reinvent themselves, much as the music has now reluctantly been forced to do.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Allowing people to use computers to 'mine' vast banks of copyrighted material would damage the economy, the UK Publishers Association has said."

Hold on....

"Allowing people to use computers to 'mine' vast banks of copyrighted material would damage our client's vast unjustified profits gained by writing the lowest common sort of rubbish allowed into print, the UK Publishers Association has said."

[Dr Paul Taylor]

Intellectual armed robbery

Once upon a time publishers used to copy-edit, typeset, print and distribute journals. They never did peer review - fellow academics always did that, for nothing.

For over 20 years authors have been typesetting their own papers in LaTeX. More recently publishers have stopped even printing or distributing journals. They just run difficult-to-use websites, which I can do for myself, thank you. As for the copy-editing, ie the introduction of errors, don't get me started.

Academic authors are compelled to submit to the theft of their intellectual property by universities and goverments. Research funding and employment are increasingly determined by indices of journals. These are compiled by the publishing industry, on a commercial basis not an intellectual one, for example favouring homopathy over category theory.

After robbing academic authors of their intellectual property at gunpoint, publishers then sell it back to them and their universities in vastly over-priced journal subscriptions. I remind those who point out that governments and universities pay for the research in the first place that the "copyright transfer" is not to the university but to a commercial organisation that has contributed NOTHING to the process.

I don't care much about the music and videos that people copy, but I strongly suspect that the corporations that make so much fuss over this issue are directly related to the ones that steal my intellectual property off me.

[Hatless Pemberty]

Paying for the room too

And you forgot to mention that in many disciplines you also have to pay to submit a paper. Per page. More if you have colour "plates". And tables with too many "ruled lines" used to cost more too. (that made sense back in the days of hot metal printing but now they're just taking the piss)

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

@Intellectual armed robbery

Before publishers - institutes used to publish their own journals and swap them with other institutions. Then in the 20c it became too expensive and inefficient to run your own printing press and so commercial journals took over.

Now it seems that universities would be better off running their own on-line journals again.