Newsweek丨Zhao Dexin's road to rights protection: knowledge must be respected
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor who has studied economic history for most of his life in his late nineties, has recently attracted public attention because of a lawsuit.
As he sued the academic resources network platform CNKI for infringement and won the lawsuit, his rights defense behavior also caused other scholars to follow suit this week.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: I edited a "Dictionary of Chinese Economic History", which was made into an electronic version by CNKI. This is the "Dictionary of Chinese Economic History" that I modified myself. My assistant will use the electronic version. I said that in my name, in the name of the author, I asked HowNet to ask for one, but HowNet does not give it, and you have to download it for 26 yuan.
This made me angry.
We don’t give me a penny for the things we create. I download them and I want to use them. You have to ask me for money. This is unreasonable.
Zhao Dexin discovered that he still had more than 100 papers collected by CNKI without authorization, so he sued for infringing on the information network dissemination rights of the work and received a total of more than 700,000 yuan in compensation. At the same time, his articles were also synchronized by CNKI. Off the shelf.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: I wrote some articles in collaboration with others. When the court decides on the article, the author must be authorized by the collaborators. More than 80% of these collaborators support me, and two people do not interfere. In fact, it just doesn't support me.
They are worried that HowNet will remove his articles and that HowNet will no longer include his articles, which means that his articles will not be recognized by the school, because in some schools, articles written by teachers are published in journals and found on HowNet. It counts.
Although it won the lawsuit, CNKI also apologized to Zhao Dexin in its public response.
However, in the face of one of the largest academic resource platforms in the country, all articles were taken off the shelves, which also means that Zhao Dexin's research results are difficult to download and use by the audience. In his opinion, this is not a win-win result.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: I now have salary income and subsidies from the school.
This lawsuit is not for money, the purpose is not money, but respect for me.
In the past, knowledge exchange was very difficult. Writing a paper to collect information was just copying word by word on paper.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: I started using computers in the 1990s. I think the changes have been too great. The revolutionary changes have provided us with great convenience, speeded up the scientific research process, and accelerated the process of knowledge exchange.
When I first started the lawsuit, my wife didn't agree. Everyone didn't want money. Why are you doing this, because our articles are all on it, and CNKI spread it for us. We were happy at first, thanks to CNKI.
In the era of lack of information, Zhao Dexin is more eager than ordinary people for the exchange of knowledge to become smooth. Today, when information technology is empowering academic resources, the relationship between the creators, users of knowledge, and the platform between them is the relationship between the three Whether it can be straightened out will also affect academic innovation and development.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: Knowledge creators should get a little profit, and the platform for reprinting should get some handling fees and profits. A reasonable profit is not a huge profit. Users should pay a little fee for the use of knowledge. Among these three points, knowledge User fees should be reduced to the lowest level, because most of them are college students and graduate students, young teachers.
Now it is not to pay for knowledge creators, but for knowledge users to pay high prices.
You must respect knowledge, intellectual property rights, and intellectuals. This is the creator of knowledge. You must also protect the rights and interests of knowledge users. You must also become a friend of intellectuals, which is conducive to the dissemination of knowledge and plays a real role as an academic exchange platform.
Looking at the financial report of the parent company of HowNet, it is not difficult to find that last year, HowNet’s annual revenue exceeded 1.1 billion, with a gross profit margin of nearly 54%.
Take master's and doctoral dissertations as examples. Authors can be paid more than 100 yuan if they are included in CNKI. However, the platform can charge 15 to 25 yuan for each download. The high profits are behind the authors' meager income.
Zhao Dexin, a retired professor of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law: The premise of innovation is to protect intellectual property rights. I feel that protecting rights is not only my personal business, but I also have the responsibility of the professor. I understand the status of the country, especially the economic development. I know what status and where academic development is.
Under such circumstances, some people need to break through the barriers to development, some people need to speak up for justice, respect knowledge, and respect knowledge as well as intellectuals.
The greater significance is that it is conducive to the implementation of innovation strategies and is conducive to the development of our country. This significance cannot be underestimated.