[Cryptography] **Copyright seizure approaching** SpaCCS 2019 CFP (10+SIs): The 12th International Conference on Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Computation, Communication and Storage

[#3301]

On 3/10/19 5:10 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> Don't submit your paper to this conference!  When researchers refuse to
> supply their papers to the publishers who extort monopoly fees from
> academic librarians, they have found the easiest way to tear down these
> monopolies.
>
> If you submit any paper to this conference, you will be forced
> to assign your entire copyright in the paper to "Springer Nature
> Switzerland AG", now and forever, for their profit and your loss
> and the public's loss (see below).
>
> Jun Feng is a program chair.  He should know to warn authors that
> the whole conference is a scam on academic authors, which steals their
> copyrights in order to extract large fees from academic libraries.  But
> perhaps he did not mention this because he's helping to run the scam.
>
> I recommend publishing your work in Open Access conferences and journals
> in which (1) you are free to retain your copyright and control your
> rights, and (2) the public is free to read your paper without paying
> exhorbitant fees to a walled-garden publisher that prevents public
> access to your scholarship.  See
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access .  For example, the USENIX
> Association runs many respected conferences and does Open Access
> publication of their proceedings (https://www.usenix.org/).  The Public
> Library of Science journals are also Open Access
> (https://www.plos.org/).  Open access publishing increases your impact,
> because all potential readers can actually read your paper.  Many
> funders and academic institutions *require* that your work be published
> with open access, because they have seen how the academic publishing
> monopoly has damaged academic libraries (and science in general).
>
> For general info about the highly profitable scams around academic
> publishing, see:
>
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing#Publishers_and_business_aspects
>
> 	John Gilmore

Pay-to-Pub and pay-to-peek are like a toll road on information.
Modern-day, self-appointed aristocrats believe they have the divine
right to extract income from the people who actually make things.

The Pacer control (paywall garden) of USA court documents and West
Publishing's control of code and statute publishing are reminiscent of
the scheme herein alleged. Access to legal code and cryptic lawyerese is
controlled by the size of your pocketbook. They invent their own
interpretation of the code. They obscure the interpretation of the code.
They install trapdoors to capriciously alter the interpretation of the
code. They hold you accountable to this obscure and inaccessible code.
They control and limit your access to the code. Then they charge you
ridiculous fees to access the code, which should be a public record but
is held under private copyright. Then they re-interpret the code and
rule against you anyway after you paid and successfully argued that the
code supports your position.

Of course the damage done to poor litigants is massive. I believe the
motives behind both hijackings of information are similar. They turn
important and sacred things into marketplace commodities, then extort
from the very creators of the stolen or public goods.

#3301