ACM censors linking!

RavineLP 4 weeks ago on Twitter

Oh, and i forgot to mention that they dont like links too. http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=101 Is there a hastag for them ?

Reply

Silhouette 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

> But even without those links, in the Search Age, if you've got the ToC, it's easy to find those preprints; so, in effect, the ToC is the proceedings; if it can't be copyrighted, then there's effectively no copyright in the proceedings.

Ultimately, I think this is where we disagree. If the ACM holds the copyright for the papers themselves, then those who are reproducing the contents of the papers are infringing. If the ACM does not prohibit redistribution of the content, then arguing that merely reproducing a load of links to it is like arguing that hyperlinking is illegal. I'm pretty sure someone did try that at one point, and from the fact that we're all still doing it, I'm pretty sure how the case turned out.

I'm afraid I don't see any legal merit in arguing that the "ToC is the proceedings". That demonstrably isn't true, not least because the ACM itself provides a lot of citation/abstract material on its own Digital Library service, but despite being in the "Search Age", anyone who wants to read the contents still has to buy their way past the paywall in a lot of cases.

That brings us back to the case we were discussing earlier, claiming some sort of compilation copyright on the ToC, which has merit (in the US, at least) only if the ToC involves some degree of originality. In any case, my original point was that you could avoid any ambiguity there by reproducing the same factual information in a significantly different format.

At that point, unless the jurisdiction in question provides database rights as well and they apply in this sort of situation, which I'm fairly sure the US does not, I just don't see that the ACM has much of a leg to stand on. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

Since the ACM envies the bad press the IEEE gets… « visualization, etc. 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Wordpress

[…] and it now seems that ACM is trying to steal some of that spotlight. The ACM publications board has decided to shut down some of the most useful resources available on the web for indexing recent conference papers, such […]

Reply

teraflop 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

The same links to the papers are (temporarily?) still available, in a less organized format, through the "changelog" pages:

http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2009-changelog.html

http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008-changelog.html

http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2007-changelog.html

http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2006-changelog.html

http://kesen .huang.googlepages.com/sig2005-changelog.html

Grab a copy now, before they disappear. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

curupa 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

ACM/SIGGRAPH censoring official links to papers? WTF! http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=101

Reply

cerebrum 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

There was an article by a famous programmer saying that ACM is a scam. I just forgot who wrote it.

Reply

DonutsCureCancer 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Wow, someone has some passive-aggressive issues =)

Reply

slashgrin 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

> (*) Changed the wording here, because some dip-shit on Reddit can’t understand the message otherwise.

Calling your readers names when they help you correct errors in your article doesn't sound to me like a great way to win respect.

Reply

swaroop 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Hackernews

Got an email reply from the ACM folks:The issue here is copyright, not censorship. All of the author versions that were linked to on these pages are still available -- ACM explicitly grants individual authors the right to post their own versions of their papers on their own pages. All ACM bibliographic data, and tables of contents in the DL, are available without cost to anyone in the world. If you want the copy of a SIGGRAPH paper and an author has posted it, you can still access it without an ACM subscription. Also note there would be no problem with these pages if they linked to the ACM version of the papers. Other lists of papers, compilations that Ke-Sen Huang built (rather than copying the table of contents from a publication) are not affected. Furthermore, the SIGAsia2009 pages Ke-Sen Huang makes available are still there until the papers are available in the ACM DL in the interest of promoting the conference.

The copyright issue that applies is described in this link:

http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Li...

" ACM treats links as citations (references to objects) rather than as incorporations (embedding of objects). Permission is not needed to create links to citations in The Portal (ACM Digital Library or Online Guide to Computing Literature). ACM encourages the widespread distribution of links to the definitive versions of its copyrighted works in the ACM Digital Library and does not require that authors obtain prior permission to include such links in their new works.

However, someone who creates a work or a service whose pattern of links substantially duplicates a copyrighted work should get prior permission from the copyright holder. One example: the creator of "A Table of Contents for the Current Issue of TODS" -- consisting of citations and active links to author-versions of the works in the latest issue of TODS -- needs ACM permission because that creator is reproducing an ACM-copyrighted work. If all the links in the "Table of Contents" pointed to the ACM-held definitive versions, ACM would normally give permission because then the new work advertises an ACM work. To avoid misunderstandings, consult with ACM before duplicating an ACM work via links." ... See all content Hide content

Reply

p4r4d0x 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Kind of like when major media organisations issue a 'request' to remove videos from youtube?

Reply

jrockway 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Hackernews

Copyright does not prevent you from independently building a set of data that someone else has already built, it merely protects against copying their set verbatim.

Reply

Silhouette 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

I didn't see the actual web page in this case, but if the ACM's claim is based on mere compilation copyright in the ToC then that should be easy enough to work around by presenting the same information in a different way. Although reading other people's comments in this discussion about preferring the affected page over the ACM's own offerings, it sounds like this might have been the case already. .. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

amichail 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Hackernews

See discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a6tsm/acm_censo...

Reply

delroth_ 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

ACM censoring links to their papers : http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=101

Reply

jacquesm 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Hackernews

Because they are deeplinks to papers.But that shouldn't matter, if the ACM wants to start putting those papers up in HTML for the world to read that would be my preference anyway.

Reply

scott_s 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Hackernews

Take a look at the pages that are still up (which are for non-ACM conferences). It was a list of the proceedings, with links to freely available copies of all of the papers. Presumably, these papers are on the authors' websites.Note that the ACM copyright form explicitly allows authors to put up a copy of their published paper on their own website. So, from what I can surmise, they requested he take down links to material that is freely and legally available. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

acousticcoupler 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Yeah .gov is notorious for porn.

Reply

mistercow 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

>We need a simple law: for all government sponsored research, within 2 months of publication in any journal, an electronic version of the paper must be made available to a freely accessible government archive.

My understanding is that this is essentially how it works in Japan.

Reply

klafka 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

the NIH now basically requires this and as a plus most open access journals require you to publish your data.

Reply

mionendy 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

It's kind of ironic that computer science is the one field in which open source conf/journal has exactly zero prestige. But that's the way it is.

Fact: If you are publishing in a CS conference that is not ACM or IEEE, then you might as well not publish at all (VERY few exceptions to this rule). Also nearly every top conference, the ones that we would kill for, is ACM. No one is going to stop submitting just because of crap like this. SIGGRAPH, SIGCOMM, SOSP, NSDI, MOBISYS, MOBICOM, IPSN, SENSYS, SIGMOD, DAC, DATE, PLDI, etc etc etc. They could jack up the rates and forbid anyone to read it and that wouldn't change a thing. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

tek_news 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Reddit/p: ACM censoring linking to publically available computer graphics research papers! http://bit.ly/6FdLlZ

Reply

peeonyou 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

That's exactly the problem that more and more companies and organizations are going to have to deal with. Many are not even necessary anymore but they cling to survival and beg the government to allow them to live, which it tends to do.

Reply

SmallCasserole 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

That's a pity, Ke-Sen Huang's compilation of computing paper links has been knobbled by ACM http://bit.ly/6CA9Lahttp://bit.ly/6ewrns

Reply

ChristerEricson 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Twitter

Fuck you ACM! http://bit.ly/5w0rAf

Reply

hishadow 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

These pages has been up for years now and practically anyone who has dabbled in computer graphics, from hobbyist to professional, are bound to have visited these pages. So why now?

Reply

luchak 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

This sucks. I have access to the ACM site, and I liked Ke-Sen's page better. Yes, it was just a static list of links. But the best alternative I know of, [this page](http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1576246&type=proceeding&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=62827718&CFTOKEN=61981728), is less readable, is harder to find, and most frustratingly contains no links to the authors' project pages (which frequently contain supplemental material beyond what the ACM has).

I mean, look at the ACM's page for [this paper](http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1576246.1531343&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&type=series&idx=SERIES382&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=SIGGRAPH&CFID=62827718&CFTOKEN=61981728). Where is the video? You have to do a new (Google) search to find the [project page](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/HarmonicFLuids/), which has everything you'd want to see. Not a huge inconvenience for one paper, but when you're trying to review the recent literature in a field, or when you're trying to remember which paper had that one demo you're thinking of, it's a pain.

I should probably write the ACM an email. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

plbogen 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

>Legally even the author isn't allowed to publish anything he published on ACM.

There is good reason to this beyond the money. It gives the professional society a mechanism to prevent authors from publishing the same material (or very similar) in multiple conferences to bump their pub count which is one of the primary determining factors for getting tenure.

Reply

racergr 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Which once more concludes to the fact that the scientific process is rotten.

Reply

bonzinip 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

> There is good reason to this beyond the money.

In fact, they don't care if you reuse an ACM conference paper as part of an IEEE journal article or a Springer book.

Reply

anonymous-coward 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Right. This is what they really care about. Not maintaing a monopoly on access to someone else's work.

And peer review doesn't catch multiple repeat pubs. For example, I'm just *imagining* those times I've rejected papers because they were insufficiently original.

Reply

twak 3 months, 3 weeks ago on Reddit

Quick catch up for those not in graphics:

Siggraph is _the_ big graphics conference (publishing there helps your careers lots).

ACM is the parent organization to sigg.

In order to get published there you have to assign the copyright of your article to siggraph.

So far the ACM have ignored infringements/preprints on the authors websites.

You generally have to pay to download material from the ACM (Academics don't notice because Universities pay for them).

Huang's webpage was top in the google search for "siggraph 2009 papers" and linked to the authors sites, so anyone could download the papers.

Open-source journals are gaining ground because of things like this, but doing so very slowly. These aren't so prestigious. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

dopplex 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Another big point here is that research in graphics is predominantly disseminated at conferences - and those conferences are dominated by SIGGRAPH. Unlike other areas of academia, publishing in a journal is not the typical route to prestige.

I had just joined this year, and thus far the resources had seemed well worth it... This makes me a bit more hesitant about my decision to pay to play .

I very much hope that those open-source journals gain traction. SIGGRAPH has a ton of inertia though. ... See all content Hide content

Reply

jldugger 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

So ACM is claiming copyright not over the papers linked to, but the set of papers linked to?

Reply

dons 3 months, 3 weeks ago on Reddit

Surely you can continue to link to preprints... there'll be a revolution if they try to crack down on that.

Reply

alexjc 3 months, 3 weeks ago on Reddit

The ACM is most likely in a strong position legally. Looking at their copyright assignment forms, they own everything -- assuming the authors just signed it without crossing out clauses.

However, I still agree with the sentiment of this anti-ACM rant. Their reputation will tank because of this... Watch it happen here!

(Maybe a more important question is that you shouldn't host pages on Google if this kind of censorship happens behind your back without you knowing.) ... See all content Hide content

Reply

yena 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Nil. You're supposed to be happy to be published at all. Publish or perish, right?

Reply

plbogen 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

Except the people publishing and the ACM are the same people. In theory (although they don't enforce it), you have to be an active ACM member to publish in an ACM sponsored conference.

Reply

alexjc 3 months, 2 weeks ago on Reddit

I like where you're going with this. You could argue the contract was invalid in the first place. There's actually nothing of value in the copyright assignment form going from the ACM to the authors.

Reply