The folks over at Uncommon Descent Report a news release from Expelled: The Movie.
Success has many fathers, but according to the producers, their baby is adopted.
Here’s a chance for you to be the judge. Turn the page and decide for yourself, which, if any, of the following suitors is the real father.
Nicely done.
I’ve tried to explain to folks how they are obviously the same image (from a molecular biologist’s persepective). But I always hear “of course they look the same, it’s the same process”.
You make the point marvelously.
Good work. Could you please give credits or sources for the images used? I’d like to check some of them out further.
That’s a great set of images. Actually, it would make a great courtroom exhibit, so you might want to sent it to XVIVO or NCSE, in case XVIVO seeks a temporary restraining order against Premise.
From Uncommon Descent — link above:
“A variety of papers, micrographs, illustrations and animations with depictions of the cellular transport system of kinesin were used and are freely available on the internet. We invite you to learn more about this incredible little transport engine through the following links:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/december10/kinesinproof-1210.html
http://www.stanford.edu/group/blocklab/kinesin.html
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bpa/reports_bmm.html
http://www.umich.edu/news/MT/04/Fall04/story.html?molecular
http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2006/july-06-NobutakaHirokawa.html
http://bioweb.bio.uci.edu/sgross/NaturesNanotech.htm
http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.edu/images/iftransportcartoon.gif
http://www.goldmanlab.northwestern.edu/intro.htm
“
I’m sure XVIVO has it by now. ERV has linked to it, and she talks directly to their attorney.
[...] Posted on April 15, 2008 by Ian Midwife Toad at Darwin Central has posted the official Expelled Paternity Test. Success has many fathers, but according to the producers, their baby is [...]
Bravo, sir. Bravo!
[...] April 16, 2008 by rocky8979 Thanks to those wild and crazy rationalists at Darwin Central for bringing the world The Official EXPELLED Paternity Test. [...]
Nice one!
I copied a set of molecule images for a similar purpose. It’s all the same molecule from the same angle but with different display conventions and options – many of the images look very different to the untrained eye.
They’re not posted yet, though.
Nice! *applause*
I made a similar point in the following forum post, using various video renderings of protein synthesis and showing how vastly different they all were from each other, based on differing artistic visions: http://forum.darwincentral.org/viewtopic.php?p=296038#p296038
Any depiction of activities at the molecular level will necessarily be an artistic rendering, and if two renderings end up looking as strikingly alike as the XVIVO and “Expelled” video, it’s because one directly copied the other, not because there’s any one “right” way to visualize biomolecules.
I’d like to see that, Monado. Let us know when/where you post it, please.
[...] Central has an Expelled movie paternity test. Among several animations of the same subject matter, see if you can find the one that Expelled plagiarizes. It’s easy and takes only a minute. Posted in communication, science. Tags: humor, science, [...]
After examining the copyright notice for Inner life…, it appears that XVIVO performed “work for hire”.
I would be very surprised if XVIVO has a copyright stake in the Inner life video.
Especially since the Inner Life video concludes with “Copyright ©2007 Robert Lue and Alain Viel, Harvard University.”
(NOTE: The Peter Irons drafted cease and desist letter is signed by neither Robert Lue nor Alain Viel nor Harvard, but rather XVIVO officers.)
Great job, midwifetoad!
Well done, mwt!
@ ww: I’d think that the good, Christian folks of Expelled – The Movie care more about doing the right thing, not just doing the lawful thing….
William Wallace on plagiarism:
“My counsel tells me there is no controlling legal authority that says that is any violation of any law”
I like the one in A best. It looks like a stick figure Hercules carrying the Earth on his shoulders.
William Wallace, paraphrased: “It appears they ripped off Harvard University rather than some small production company, so everything is hunky dory.”
Oh… let me guess….
Please please please – let me have a guess.
(Hey man – my name *is* “Buhler”, right?)
William Wallace: “I would be very surprised if XVIVO has a copyright stake in the Inner life video.”
And I would be very surprised if William Wallace has a better grasp of XVIVO’s standing than XVIVO and their lawyers do…
WW appears to be unaware of the fact that copyright isn’t as simple, or “all-or-nothing”, as he imagines it to be. In many cases entity X will own the copyright on a work which contains elements copyrighted by Y. This in no way means that X is now the owner of the copyright of those elements.
For a well-known example, a movie (e.g. “Silence of the Lambs”) will be copyrighted by the movie studio which produced it, but contain songs (“American Girl”) that are still copyrighted by the original artists (Tom Petty). It may also contain characters (e.g. Hannibal Lecter) copyrighted by the original author (Thomas Harris).
A movie will usually explicitly list the licensed properties, out of courtesy or as a requirement of the license agreement, but shorter works that don’t have the luxury of a lengthy credits roll (such as video shorts or songs that sample other songs) usually don’t or can’t. Copyright law makes no such requirement, and the original owners don’t lose their copyright just because they aren’t mentioned when the owner of a derivative work asserts their own copyright with respect to the work that contains elements copyrighted by others.
In short, William Wallace and the folks at Uncommon Descent understand copyrights about as well as they understand science.
Beautiful! Brilliantly argued!
William Wallace: I would be very surprised if XVIVO has a copyright stake in the Inner life video.
Ichneumon: In short, William Wallace and the folks at Uncommon Descent understand copyrights about as well as they understand science.
Double underhand triple-reverse backspinning bitchslap! Full Point to Ichneumon!
Ichneumon, you make several good points.
I would only add that even if we were to assume arguendo that Harvard and not XVIVO is the true copyright owner, this would probably only mean for Premise’s current DJ action that Harvard would be subject to compulsory joinder.
[...] his good buddy Rob Reiner who has helped agitate for that idiotic new MPAA criteria. But does blatant plagiarism really count as a “disturbing image”? Oh, wait, they probably meant the footage of Nazi [...]
[...] 15 2008) There is a very tongue-in-cheek comparison at DarwinCentral. It makes the similarities quite [...]
I gotta be missing something here. The left hand images are obviously based on the right hand images and borrow some stylistic elements but they are so different in almost all other respects they are clearly independent visualizations, apart from the last example. They are different enough to be unmistakably protected as fair use.
Let’s see, you have a molecule that “walks” along the microtubule so you use footlike structures to represent it. That means you own the concept of feet. That’s as dumb as McIntosh claiming they owned the use of file folders and trash cans as icons way back when. It’s an obvious visual metaphor.
The idea that this constitutes plagiarism or copyright infringement is scary. It’s a far worse threat to intellectual freedom than anything the ID folks or creationists have dreamed up.
We’ve got, what, 20+ posts by grown people on something this trivial? Aren’t there more important faults in “Expelled” to worry about?
[...] http://blog.darwincentral.org/2008/04/15/find-ben-steins-father/ [...]