Prism — an astroturf organization established by science publishers to discredit free open access journals — has been caught using a bunch of infringing Getty images on its front page. Prism advocates against open copyright for science journals, preferring to lock up scientific knowledge with a maximal version of copyright that limits scientific endeavor to those parties who can pay rent to the corporations that fund Prism. Like many copyright maximalists, Prism only uses moral arguments about copyright as cover for self-interested greed — they talk a good line about “respecting copyright,” but what they mean is, “pay us and pay us and pay us, and screw everyone else.”
In short, they want to protect science by locking it up under copyright. They want to restrict access to publicly-funded research results by requiring that everyone pay a fee to see it. There are plenty of reasons why PRISM’s logic falls apart (see here for a thorough bashing), but I wanted to point out just one: they’re hypocritical. While their entire web site advocates strict enforcement of copyright laws, the images they’ve used on their front page are a violation of copyright law. Take a look at this screenshot from their front page:
Notice how the hairdo of the handsome scientist in the large photo is marred by the “Getty Images” logo? That’s a digital water mark that stock photo suppliers use to keep unscrupulous publishers from “borrowing” their images. A quick search of the Getty Images web site locates the identical photo, with the identical watermark.
Clearly PRISM was too cheap, or in too much of a hurry, to bother with copyright (if you look closely at the other two photos, you’ll see watermarks on them as well).
(via /.)