6 ms·

License University of Michigan's Databases of Academic Speech and Student Papers

87 points by lopkeny12ko 3y ago

Kon-Peki 3y ago
Did the students opt in?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  Discourse on the web suggests students are not even aware of this. So probably not.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    Where can I find some of the discourse?
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure there's a clause buried somewhere in something the students signed.
  - breather 3y ago
    The american education system is absolutely insane—paying to get fucked!
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      EVERYTHING in America is designed to fuck you as hard as possible unless you can pay. Literally everything is about incentivizing you to give as much of your personal cash up as possible to lessen the shit being shoveled onto you. This is what happens when you abandon people and enshrine "greed is good" as a National philosophy for 40 years.
      - zogrodea 3y ago
        Unfortunately, like seemingly every aspect of North American culture, this philosophy is being exported and accepted in other countries too, like Egypt as one example. “Patterns of behavior that were highly regarded in a more stable society such as sticking to one’s word or promise, pride and personal integrity, are now less prized. Such values are less fit for a rapidly changing society where loyalty to old relationships, be they friends, spouses, places or principles appears as nothing more than an excessive sentimentality unbecoming in one who is on the make.” - Galal Amin, in Whatever Happened to the Egyptians
- wolverine876 3y ago
  I wonder if students could put copyright clauses on their papers.
  - lupire 3y ago
    Copyright is always all rights reserved by default. No need to put a clause on a paper.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      A license, perhaps?
- lupire 3y ago
  Yes.
htrp 3y ago
This has to be a joke right? ----------------------------------------- One-time License Fee Academic Speech Dataset: $15,595 Academic Papers Dataset: $12,595 Combined Academic Speech & Papers Datasets: $25,000 --------------------------------------------------- Speech Dataset: 85 hours of high-quality audio recordings in mp3 format Papers Dataset: 829 student papers in txt format
- gamepsys 3y ago
  Charge a student $800 in tutition and fees to attend a class. Student writes 3 good papers in the class. License the three papers to 10 AI models for $45 for a total of $450. College increases student revenue by >50%. This setup is clearly unfair and feels predatory. Anyone that has been in a graduate lab that was working on a project actually worth money has seen this side of college before. However, this new marketplace introduces an interesting line of questioning. Can undergraudates/graduate students generate enough novel training data to cover their tuition? Will the 21st century scholar most valuable output be high quality material for LLMs to digest. I'd love to see a metric for determining how valuable a document is to an LLM. How accurate is the data, how much new knowledge does it add, how relevant is it to users of the LLM. If we can value a document accurately we can create a marketplace for individuals to license their creative output.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    > Charge a student $800 in tutition and fees to attend a class. Isn't that off by a factor of ~10? $800 x 4 classes/semester x 2 semesters = $6,400/year. I don't know how much U. of Michigan charges, but I expect it's closer to $64K than $6.4K.
    - gamepsys 3y ago
      I just checked and Michigian's in-state tuition is currently $17,228/semester[0]. Yeah, cost of tuition is very wrong. Using this new number -- which is just a more accurate estimation -- the student tuition for the class is $4,300 and ten licenses for an output of 3 papers would be a ~10% increase in revenue per student. [0] https://admissions.umich.edu/costs-aid/costs https://admissions.umich.edu/costs-aid/costs
ashton314 3y ago
It always makes me sad to see a university selling out so hard. Profit profit profit! Learning? Knowledge? Education? Only if it leads to more profit for students… but especially if it means more profit for the university.
reaperman 3y ago
It's not clear how the "Catalyst Research Alliance" is associated with University of Michigan. It's not hosted on umich.edu, there's no information on https://catalystresearch.io https://catalystresearch.io [0] about any agreements or partnership with UMich, and there's not even any information at all on any people running "Catalyst Research Alliance" -- which is normal for shady SaaS startups but very very unusual for academic research alliances. It's not clear that Catalyst Research Alliance obtained the rights to "re-sell" the database. I believe the datasets are available for free here on UMich.edu[1]: So it's not clear that "CRA" has a "right" to "license" these to anyone. CRA also "licenses" this freely available genomics database: https://ctdbase.org https://ctdbase.org [2] IANAL, but per LinkedIn[3], the CRA founder Doug Eisner is one (Boston University Law, 1992). Perhaps he knows something I don't about selling licenses to other people's intellectual property. The MICASE license at umich.edu states: MICASE Fair Use Statement[4] MICASE is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan, who hold the copyright. The database has been developed by the English Language Institute, and the web interface by Digital Library Production Services. The database is freely available at the MICASE website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as either this statement of availability or the citation given below appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. MICUSP Fair Use Statement[5] The Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan (UM), who hold the copyright. The corpus has been developed by researchers at the UM English Language Institute. The corpus files are freely available for study, research and teaching. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database[6] CTDTM is provided to enhance knowledge and encourage progress in the scientific community. It is to be used only for research and educational purposes. Medical treatment decisions should not be made based on the information in CTD. Any reproduction or use for commercial purpose is prohibited without the prior express written permission of the MDI Biological Laboratory and NC State University. So the HN headline is slightly wrong. The University of Michigan is making this data available for free for non-profit or academic research purposes, and also offers custom commercial licensing for the datasets. It's possible that CRA is running a legitimate license reselling service with dubious value-add services on top, but it's definitely not clear what their relationships with these universities really are. 0: https://catalystresearch.io https://catalystresearch.io 1: https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.html https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.h... 2: https://ctdbase.org https://ctdbase.org 3: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougeisner/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougeisner/ 4: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MICASE%20Fair%20Use%20Statement.pdf https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI... 5: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MICUSP%20Fair%20Use%20Statement.pdf https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI... 6: https://ctdbase.org/about/legal.jsp https://ctdbase.org/about/legal.jsp
costanzaDynasty 3y ago
What they should be selling is a sport franchise license. Disconnect sports from the university but keep the facade. Let another entity incur the costs that will be coming down the road but still get the other benefits, financial and otherwise. I'd love to say that this would bring down the cost of an education but I wasn't born yesterday.
- tdb7893 3y ago
  I thought college sports are often profitable (or at least not that expensive) at least partially since not paying athletes saves them a lot of money
  - HeWhoLurksLate 3y ago
    The not paying college students thing is changing a lot with new name and likeness rules
  - AaronFriel 3y ago
    Most university athletic programs are unprofitable, if examined solely through the lens of outlays vs direct revenue. It's of course harder to measure the consequences on recruitment, alumni attachment to the school, etc. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-explain-it-me/should-institutions-support-sports-programs-don%E2%80%99t-make-money https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-explain-it-me/shou... > The 2020 report found only 25 Division I programs had revenues exceeding expenses. No Division II or III program had revenues exceeding expenses. There are 1,102 Division I, II and III schools. I was active in budget committees as a student, and while my alma mater was in Division I, it was always in the red. It's a really hard decision for the student services committee every year to raise fees or cut funding, and the pressure from the athletics program to cut their budget last was intense. We tried to keep fee increases at or under the "higher education price index", but that itself is a flawed measure as it consistently is greater than CPI.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
whatshisface 3y ago
Can we have copyright recognized on prose works delivered orally in a public setting?
- breather 3y ago
  Typically it's the recording and transcript that's copyrighted.
suddenclarity 3y ago
I'm surprised they are paying for this. There's a Swedish company just requesting this from schools since it's public information so they have to provide it by law.
- tokai 3y ago
  Surprising, how does that square with GDPR?
  - xphilter 3y ago
    Effectively, GDPR only applies to EU nationals. US folks have no such rights and anyone even remotely associated with an institution like U of M are forced to agree to whatever data terms and policies U of M wants.
    - codingdave 3y ago
      > no such rights Here is the US privacy act for individuals: https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974 https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974 It contrasts with FOIA and public records acts, of course, so there is a wealth of rabbit holes to go down on exactly where lines get drawn, but saying "no such rights" is simply inaccurate. If you work with public institutions you get pulled in both directions.
  - codingdave 3y ago
    US-based federal entitles have a completely different set of rules (See: https://www.foia.gov/ https://www.foia.gov/). And the educational system get federal funds, so some of its data is public. There are likewise public records laws at the state level in many cases which open up even more data to the public.
- lupire 3y ago
  Student homework is public domain in Sweden?
xphilter 3y ago
They previously sold athlete data, no one should be surprised by this. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/wearable-technology-nike-privacy-college-football.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/weara...
- carlystaff74 3y ago
  Did not know that... Wow
ConnorMooneyhan 3y ago
What is it with that university and questionable practices...
breather 3y ago
How did they get ahold of the copyright?
isotypic 3y ago
A statement by the University of Michigan has been made: https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/licensing-of-papers-and-recordings/ https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/licensing-...
- lupire 3y ago
  So the OP is (probably illegally) reselling free stuff that was published on the web 10 years ago. How did this get so much traction so quickly?
  - lopkeny12ko 3y ago
    1. I am not affiliated with the organization in the submission. 2. It gained traction quickly because monetization of an egregious violation of student privacy is discussion-worthy.

87 points by lopkeny12ko 3y ago

Kon-Peki 3y ago

Did the students opt in?

lopkeny12ko 3y ago
Discourse on the web suggests students are not even aware of this. So probably not.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Where can I find some of the discourse?
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
I'm pretty sure there's a clause buried somewhere in something the students signed.
- breather 3y ago
  The american education system is absolutely insane—paying to get fucked!
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    EVERYTHING in America is designed to fuck you as hard as possible unless you can pay. Literally everything is about incentivizing you to give as much of your personal cash up as possible to lessen the shit being shoveled onto you. This is what happens when you abandon people and enshrine "greed is good" as a National philosophy for 40 years.
    - zogrodea 3y ago
      Unfortunately, like seemingly every aspect of North American culture, this philosophy is being exported and accepted in other countries too, like Egypt as one example. “Patterns of behavior that were highly regarded in a more stable society such as sticking to one’s word or promise, pride and personal integrity, are now less prized. Such values are less fit for a rapidly changing society where loyalty to old relationships, be they friends, spouses, places or principles appears as nothing more than an excessive sentimentality unbecoming in one who is on the make.” - Galal Amin, in Whatever Happened to the Egyptians
wolverine876 3y ago
I wonder if students could put copyright clauses on their papers.
- lupire 3y ago
  Copyright is always all rights reserved by default. No need to put a clause on a paper.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    A license, perhaps?
lupire 3y ago
Yes.

htrp 3y ago

This has to be a joke right? ----------------------------------------- One-time License Fee Academic Speech Dataset: $15,595 Academic Papers Dataset: $12,595 Combined Academic Speech & Papers Datasets: $25,000 --------------------------------------------------- Speech Dataset: 85 hours of high-quality audio recordings in mp3 format Papers Dataset: 829 student papers in txt format

gamepsys 3y ago
Charge a student $800 in tutition and fees to attend a class. Student writes 3 good papers in the class. License the three papers to 10 AI models for $45 for a total of $450. College increases student revenue by >50%. This setup is clearly unfair and feels predatory. Anyone that has been in a graduate lab that was working on a project actually worth money has seen this side of college before. However, this new marketplace introduces an interesting line of questioning. Can undergraudates/graduate students generate enough novel training data to cover their tuition? Will the 21st century scholar most valuable output be high quality material for LLMs to digest. I'd love to see a metric for determining how valuable a document is to an LLM. How accurate is the data, how much new knowledge does it add, how relevant is it to users of the LLM. If we can value a document accurately we can create a marketplace for individuals to license their creative output.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  > Charge a student $800 in tutition and fees to attend a class. Isn't that off by a factor of ~10? $800 x 4 classes/semester x 2 semesters = $6,400/year. I don't know how much U. of Michigan charges, but I expect it's closer to $64K than $6.4K.
  - gamepsys 3y ago
    I just checked and Michigian's in-state tuition is currently $17,228/semester[0]. Yeah, cost of tuition is very wrong. Using this new number -- which is just a more accurate estimation -- the student tuition for the class is $4,300 and ten licenses for an output of 3 papers would be a ~10% increase in revenue per student. [0] https://admissions.umich.edu/costs-aid/costs https://admissions.umich.edu/costs-aid/costs

ashton314 3y ago

It always makes me sad to see a university selling out so hard. Profit profit profit! Learning? Knowledge? Education? Only if it leads to more profit for students… but especially if it means more profit for the university.

reaperman 3y ago

It's not clear how the "Catalyst Research Alliance" is associated with University of Michigan. It's not hosted on umich.edu, there's no information on https://catalystresearch.io https://catalystresearch.io [0] about any agreements or partnership with UMich, and there's not even any information at all on any people running "Catalyst Research Alliance" -- which is normal for shady SaaS startups but very very unusual for academic research alliances. It's not clear that Catalyst Research Alliance obtained the rights to "re-sell" the database. I believe the datasets are available for free here on UMich.edu[1]: So it's not clear that "CRA" has a "right" to "license" these to anyone. CRA also "licenses" this freely available genomics database: https://ctdbase.org https://ctdbase.org [2] IANAL, but per LinkedIn[3], the CRA founder Doug Eisner is one (Boston University Law, 1992). Perhaps he knows something I don't about selling licenses to other people's intellectual property. The MICASE license at umich.edu states: MICASE Fair Use Statement[4] MICASE is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan, who hold the copyright. The database has been developed by the English Language Institute, and the web interface by Digital Library Production Services. The database is freely available at the MICASE website for study, teaching and research purposes, and copies of the transcripts may be distributed, as long as either this statement of availability or the citation given below appears in the text. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. MICUSP Fair Use Statement[5] The Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP) is owned by the Regents of the University of Michigan (UM), who hold the copyright. The corpus has been developed by researchers at the UM English Language Institute. The corpus files are freely available for study, research and teaching. However, if any portion of this material is to be used for commercial purposes, such as for textbooks or tests, permission must be obtained in advance and a license fee may be required. The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database[6] CTDTM is provided to enhance knowledge and encourage progress in the scientific community. It is to be used only for research and educational purposes. Medical treatment decisions should not be made based on the information in CTD. Any reproduction or use for commercial purpose is prohibited without the prior express written permission of the MDI Biological Laboratory and NC State University. So the HN headline is slightly wrong. The University of Michigan is making this data available for free for non-profit or academic research purposes, and also offers custom commercial licensing for the datasets. It's possible that CRA is running a legitimate license reselling service with dubious value-add services on top, but it's definitely not clear what their relationships with these universities really are. 0: https://catalystresearch.io https://catalystresearch.io 1: https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.html https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.h... 2: https://ctdbase.org https://ctdbase.org 3: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougeisner/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougeisner/ 4: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MICASE%20Fair%20Use%20Statement.pdf https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI... 5: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MICUSP%20Fair%20Use%20Statement.pdf https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI... 6: https://ctdbase.org/about/legal.jsp https://ctdbase.org/about/legal.jsp

costanzaDynasty 3y ago

What they should be selling is a sport franchise license. Disconnect sports from the university but keep the facade. Let another entity incur the costs that will be coming down the road but still get the other benefits, financial and otherwise. I'd love to say that this would bring down the cost of an education but I wasn't born yesterday.

tdb7893 3y ago
I thought college sports are often profitable (or at least not that expensive) at least partially since not paying athletes saves them a lot of money
- HeWhoLurksLate 3y ago
  The not paying college students thing is changing a lot with new name and likeness rules
- AaronFriel 3y ago
  Most university athletic programs are unprofitable, if examined solely through the lens of outlays vs direct revenue. It's of course harder to measure the consequences on recruitment, alumni attachment to the school, etc. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-explain-it-me/should-institutions-support-sports-programs-don%E2%80%99t-make-money https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-explain-it-me/shou... > The 2020 report found only 25 Division I programs had revenues exceeding expenses. No Division II or III program had revenues exceeding expenses. There are 1,102 Division I, II and III schools. I was active in budget committees as a student, and while my alma mater was in Division I, it was always in the red. It's a really hard decision for the student services committee every year to raise fees or cut funding, and the pressure from the athletics program to cut their budget last was intense. We tried to keep fee increases at or under the "higher education price index", but that itself is a flawed measure as it consistently is greater than CPI.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

whatshisface 3y ago

Can we have copyright recognized on prose works delivered orally in a public setting?

breather 3y ago
Typically it's the recording and transcript that's copyrighted.

suddenclarity 3y ago

I'm surprised they are paying for this. There's a Swedish company just requesting this from schools since it's public information so they have to provide it by law.

tokai 3y ago
Surprising, how does that square with GDPR?
- xphilter 3y ago
  Effectively, GDPR only applies to EU nationals. US folks have no such rights and anyone even remotely associated with an institution like U of M are forced to agree to whatever data terms and policies U of M wants.
  - codingdave 3y ago
    > no such rights Here is the US privacy act for individuals: https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974 https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974 It contrasts with FOIA and public records acts, of course, so there is a wealth of rabbit holes to go down on exactly where lines get drawn, but saying "no such rights" is simply inaccurate. If you work with public institutions you get pulled in both directions.
- codingdave 3y ago
  US-based federal entitles have a completely different set of rules (See: https://www.foia.gov/ https://www.foia.gov/). And the educational system get federal funds, so some of its data is public. There are likewise public records laws at the state level in many cases which open up even more data to the public.
lupire 3y ago
Student homework is public domain in Sweden?

xphilter 3y ago

They previously sold athlete data, no one should be surprised by this. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/wearable-technology-nike-privacy-college-football.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/weara...

carlystaff74 3y ago
Did not know that... Wow

ConnorMooneyhan 3y ago

What is it with that university and questionable practices...

breather 3y ago

How did they get ahold of the copyright?

isotypic 3y ago

A statement by the University of Michigan has been made: https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/licensing-of-papers-and-recordings/ https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/licensing-...

lupire 3y ago
So the OP is (probably illegally) reselling free stuff that was published on the web 10 years ago. How did this get so much traction so quickly?
- lopkeny12ko 3y ago
  1. I am not affiliated with the organization in the submission. 2. It gained traction quickly because monetization of an egregious violation of student privacy is discussion-worthy.