intellectual property
TagCalling Dibs in Philosophy
Barry Lam (UC Riverside) wrote recently about the practice of “calling dibs.” (more…)
What Will Academia.edu Do with Its New Rights to Your Name, Likeness, and Voice? (updated)
Users of the Academia.edu service are cancelling their subscriptions in response to perceived overreach by the firm in its recent update to its terms of service. (more…)
Class Action Lawsuit against AI Firm for Copyright Infringement
If versions of any of your books are on LibGen or similar online collections of pirated material, there is a chance it was used as training data for AI, and you may be able to join a lawsuit about it. (more…)
Publishers Want To Sell Companies the Right to Train AI on Your Books: Should You Consent?
Should authors consent to have their publishers grant licensing requests by firms and projects to allow them to train their generative AI on their books? (more…)
Academic Publisher Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training
The international academic publishing company Taylor and Francis says “it is providing Microsoft non-exclusive access to advanced learning content and data to help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”. (more…)
Is Someone Selling Your Dissertation Without Your Permission?
A lecturer in philosophy at a UK university discovered that a company has been selling his recent dissertation as a book online through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and Blackwell’s, complete with a cover.
Sci-Hub & the Philosophy Grad Student “Pirate Queen”
You may know that Sci-Hub is a means by which to freely access academic research that normally requires a subscription or purchase. Did you know its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, is a philosophy graduate student? (more…)
Copyrights and Quotes in Academic Work
So here’s yet another case of over-the-top copyright restrictions involving something I wrote. In December 2014, the Whitehead Research Project held an excellent conference on Whitehead’s short book Symbolism (which Amazon also sells as an ebook for 99 cents). I was one of the speakers at the conference; I posted an uncorrected version of my talk, “Whitehead on Caus..