ACM/IEEE copyright policy

Matt Blaze is annoyed at the ACM and IEEE copyright policy. So am I. In an update to his post he reports:

A prominent member of the ACM asserted to me that copyright assignment and putting papers behind the ACM's centralized "digital library" paywall is the best way to ensure their long-term "integrity". That's certainly a novel theory; most computer scientists would say that wide replication, not centralization, is the best way to ensure availability, and that a centrally-controlled repository is more subject to tampering and other mischief than a decentralized and replicated one.

This is deeply ironic, because ACM bestowed both a Best Paper award and an ACM Student Research award on Petros Maniatis, Mema Roussopoulos, TJ Giuli, David S.H. Rosenthal, Mary Baker, and Yanto Muliadi, "Preserving Peer Replicas By Rate-Limited Sampled Voting", 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) , Bolton Landing, NY, October, 2003. for demonstrating that the "prominent member" is wrong and Matt is right.

If the "prominent member" wants the full details, they are available in the ACM's own Transactions on Computing Systems Vol. 23 No. 1, February 2005, pp 2-50.