Re: [DIYbio] legality of distributing pdfs or hard copy papers?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Avery louie wrote:
> What is the deal with printing or distributing electronic copies of papers
> that are obtained from school (university) subscriptions to journals? I
> could be a source of these things for my group, but I don't want to have to
> foot the bill for any copyright charges.

Manuscripts published in the United States prior to 1923 are in the
public domain, so those can be shared without wondering. Also, in the
past 10 years there has been the growing trend of publications
licensed permissively with a choice license from Creative Commons.
These tend to be very explicitly okay with all sorts of sharing and
remixing.

Most publishers will send you a notification (or even a DMCA takedown
request) if they think you are infringing on their rights. That's a
good time to talk with them to work out how they believe you are
infringing, and how the situation could be resolved to mutual
satisfaction.

Honestly, if you are worried about a publisher tracking you down for
partaking in science, then I would (with bias) recommend pdfparanoia
to strip out watermarks:
https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia

IIRC, you sometimes have people pay to attend BOSSlab ? I would be
cautious about distributing papers in that context. You have to be
especially vigilant in situations where money is changing hands. I
think publishers use sites like copyright.com to calculate how much
you owe them per distribution in a commercial/business/non-profit
context.

I am not entirely sure about what goes down if you are an unaffiliated
individual. It would be a huge violation of the trust that science has
placed in publishers if they were to go around suing readers for
reading science.

IANAL. No implied warranty or implied fitness for a particular purpose.

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Cathal Garvey
<cathal...@cathalgarvey.me> wrote:
> Aaron Swartz's case makes it pretty clear that even distributing
> out-of-copyright papers is grounds for ruinous copyright litigation.
> Yay knowledge.

Are you referring to his work on PACER? Although the FBI made him the
subject of an active investigation, there were no charges brought
against him from his PACER downloads. There was also no resulting
copyright litigation. As for his work on JSTOR, regardless of the
charges there was no distribution of content from his machine, so I am
not sure why you would cite that either...

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Cathal Garvey wrote:
> right to download all those articles. And yet: there it is. Sued for
> copyright infringement and threatened with over 40 years in federal
> prison.

He was not sued for copyright infringement. Federal prosecutors
charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> -----

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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[Bryce Lynch]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Bryan Bishop <kan...@gmail.com> wrote:

Honestly, if you are worried about a publisher tracking you down for
partaking in science, then I would (with bias) recommend pdfparanoia
to strip out watermarks:
https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia

I find the Metadata Anonymization Toolkit useful for similar things:

https://mat.boum.org/
 

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https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
"I am everywhere."

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Bryce Lynch wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:29 PM, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>> Honestly, if you are worried about a publisher tracking you down for
>> partaking in science, then I would (with bias) recommend pdfparanoia
>> to strip out watermarks:
>> https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia
>
> I find the Metadata Anonymization Toolkit useful for similar things:

Hm, it says:

"Mat only removes metadata from your files, it does not anonymise
their content, nor handle watermarking, steganography [...]"

As far as I can tell (from HTTP server logs), businesses looking for
"science violations" are searching by looking for the watermark
strings, not the metadata in the pdf's headers.

Here's some ip addresses you should block:
http://diyhpl.us/wiki/users/superkuh/sdf

But if we need to start stripping journal names, paper titles, author
names, etc., from pdfs, I am not sure how we would re-assemble that
information later, because anyone would be able to re-assemble that
information and would to find the "science violators".

[Ted Smith]

On Wed, 2013-04-24 at 12:12 -0500, Bryan Bishop wrote:
> But if we need to start stripping journal names, paper titles, author
> names, etc., from pdfs, I am not sure how we would re-assemble that
> information later, because anyone would be able to re-assemble that
> information and would to find the "science violators".

Why not just use gpg to encrypt all the PDFs, using the hostname of the
mirror of the password?

This makes things slightly more difficult for us, but not impossible,
and imposes a large cost on bots trying to enforce the Science
Interdict.

There are any number of small programmatic transformations we can apply
to PDFs that make them not obviously PDFs to bots, but obviously PDFs to
humans. Ultimately, this is how we'll have to go, because it's pretty
easy to say that diyhpl.us/text.pdf is the same as
proprietaryjournal.com/text.pdf, even without watermarks.
--
Sent from Ubuntu