Kyle Finchsigmate started a discussion in his blog, The Chem Blog, about the photo-taking audience in the ACS meeting most of whom I believe were Chinese. I can confirm this tendency. When I started blogging I was informed more than one time about my risk of broking the IP rule. And I did learn a lot about this. Thanks those people who help me politely and with good wills!

But under Kyle’s post I saw a heated discussion of two camps, one of which strongly suspected the flaw of taking photo of slides and posters without permission. My understanding of this issue is simply that it is illegal. But I still don’t know why. What I know is one must be highly respectful to the law and ethics of other countries. But if it is allowed to discuss the reason of what’s legal or illegal, I cannot decide which camp to agree with.

The pro-photo-taking camp have the following arguments:

1. presenting unpublished results on a meeting is actually publishing them I cannot agree with this argument. At least in some situation you don’t publish your results by mentioning them in the meeting orally. Indeed some meetings will become an issue of a journal, some are even themselves journals. But as far as I know talks in ACS meeting do not appear on JACS. So if a great professor who have great idea but lazy graduate student presented his thought on such a meeting, another bad professor with but hardworking graduate students may transform the idea into an JACS paper much faster. It is acceptable, isn’t it, because the former great professor’s talk in the ACS meeting cannot be regarded as formal publication?
2. taking photos differs little from taking notes This is the argument I feel most confused with. People seem to see the difference between taking photos of the whole slides and directly remembering the whole slides with one’s memory. I think these two deeds are the same. If one of them is unethical, so is the other. They may be differ in law because if I directly remember all the things there will be no evidence that I have stolen other’s idea when I use. However, we are not testing the audience about their note taking speed or memory when we give a talk in a meeting esp. with unpublished results. Or, we are not, by forbidding the fastest way of taking things down but allowing the slower ones, creating a ‘statistical gradient’ of the efficiency of informational transmission among the audience. We are not wishing our unpublished result forgotten by those who write slowly while remembered by those who read the mind. There is no difference among all ways trying tho remember the whole slides. If you disagree photo taking you must disagree deliberately remembering or fast note taking, either.
3. You should not remember the whole slides but are allowed to remember some of them This confuses me more because it immediately provokes another question: which portion of slides can be remembered? particularly, the unpublished or the rest? If the unpublished results disclosed in a meeting are not wished to be remembered after the meeting then I can see no value of presenting them in the slides. But it makes sense to me if the whole slides are not supposed to be remembered after the meeting. In this situation, a science meeting is a type of recreation that have indirect but positive effect on both the speakers and the audience, very much like a club.
4. photo taking is understandable for those with language deficiency by ’language deficiency I mean people like me when facing Scottish or Australian accent or simply French, not mentally ill people. But I still cannot say I agree with this argument which sound pretty like an excuse.

I can conclude with my view on this issue as what follow:

For the audience: If you are not intended to steal the speaker’s idea or results, you should be quite okay that you just remember the speaker’s name and wait for the formal publication under this name. There is no need to remember what’s on the slides in a meeting if that’s going to be published later. The purpose of giving a talk in a meeting is simply to inform people of future publication under a specific name.

For the speakers: If you fear that your unpublished results in the slides be stolen by the audience, present them in a meetings that require peer review of abstracts before acceptance and publish these abstracts, instead. This in effect makes any later publication of the same results plagiarism, doen’t it?

There some also some comments that mentioned the way of thinking in a different country which actually imply a curiosity why the Chinese people aren’t born to respect copyrights. The reason is simple under this wonder. Is it because Chinese speakers have little or no really unpublished (high in originality) results to fear of plagiarism? Or Chinese listeners have nothing to produce if they don’t copy works by others? Well although it is not all the cases this tendency is still exist while diminishing. But another factor which is more profound is seldom seen mentioned, that the Chinese people have a weak convention of capitalism in which personal possession is highly respected as a form of his/her money. There is indeed a Chinese saying that taking thing away without permission is actually being a thief (不问自取是为贼也), but people here seem to feel much less guilty if the things the take away without permission is in an intellectual form. I think the difference is in the default state of ethics when it comes to intellectual properties, when there is no instruction about the rights reserved from the author yet. By default all rights are reserved by the author without specific instruction in the context of western society. But it seems not the case in China. Now the Chinese government are taking great efforts forcing the law of intellectual properties, with the ‘right’ default defined, effecting among the citizens but with small success.

Nowadays information can be immediately transport to a great distance. Your speech may not only be photographed but also captured by a mobile phone which can broadcast the meeting live oversea. I think the authors should be more active in giving detailed instruction of the copyrights of their works in advance if they do want some kind of sharing or spreading of their ideas. Warn the audience explicitly with copyrights if the slides contain unpublished results, esp. when some of the audience are Asian who may not obey the same default as in other countries and regions. For other ways of rights reservation besides ‘all rights reserved’ one can refer to the ideas of Science Commons