Society of Automotive Engineers kills DRM on its journal following MIT boycott
MIT dropped its subscription to the database of past articles from the Society of Automotive Engineer because SAE had was using anti-copying DRM technology on the papers that made them less useful for scientists and researchers. After a presentation from an MIT professor about the boycott, the SAE publication board eliminated DRM for its papers:
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and SAE fellow Wai Cheng presented MIT’s concerns at the SAE’s Publication Board meeting in April 2007, which resulted in an immediate stay of DRM implementation on university campuses, and ultimately (November 2007) in a changed policy: FileOpen would not be required for university access to the SAE Digital Library.Link (Tanks, David!While the MIT Libraries have not been able to get all the assurances we would like regarding SAE’s plans for implementing other DRM tools in the future, after consulting with faculty we have decided, as Professor Cheng put it, to “work with SAE in good faith,” reentering what we hope will be a productive partnership.
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I find this slightly hypocritical of MIT Libraries (Though perhaps not of the individual professors who initiated the complaint) since at least one of MIT's own database of articles and books, the MIT Cognet system, uses DRM itself. The PDFs obtained through this system are locked for printing or copy/paste. This of course negates much of the benefit of digitizing the content in the first place.
Well, sometimes you don't learn to stop hurting people until you get hurt yourself. Hopefully they'll internalize this lesson.
Promethean points out the MIT uses DRM. How about Stanford? And if this IP data from SAE finds its way out onto the web, will anyone be hurt by this? Will the data allow someone to copy products or technology without paying for it?
Jeff,
I don't believe that the data from SAE would allow anybody to copy products or technology directly, without significant engineering work themselves. From the SAE articles that I've read, most of them seem to be about how a person/company solved a particular technical problem in a unique way. It either provides a basic understanding of the mechanism, and what makes it special, or it provides an explanation of the new problem solving technique used. One of the purposes of groups and publications like SAE is to allow professionals in the same field to compare notes so that everyone can solve problems more efficiently with more elegant solutions and generally advance the state of the art. It's more like a bunch of college students working on homework problems together, as opposed to the solutions manual. Everyone still has to do their own work, but tips and tricks may be traded among students.
Promethean (#1): it looks like CogNet is done by MIT Press, not the MIT Libraries. As in many large institutions, different groups may have different policies, procedures, and/or mindsets.