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

https://llm-academic-speech-data.catalystresearch.io/

by lopkeny12ko • 2 years ago

87 52 2 years ago

llm-academic-speech-data.catalystresearch.io

Kon-Peki• 2 years ago

Did the students opt in?

lopkeny12ko2• 2 years ago

Discourse on the web suggests students are not even aware of this. So probably not.

reaperman3• 2 years ago

Where can I find some of the discourse?

ThrowawayTestr• 2 years ago

I'm pretty sure there's a clause buried somewhere in something the students signed.

breather3• 2 years ago

The american education system is absolutely insane—paying to get fucked!

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

I wonder if students could put copyright clauses on their papers.

lupire4• 2 years ago

Yes.

htrp• 2 years 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

gamepsys3• 2 years 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.

wolverine8765• 2 years 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.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

It's kinda nice to see things like this causing us to rethink the value of our time and relations with each other. Even slaves just work for nothing. Students are the only group of people who pay to work.

araes• 2 years ago

I think the question I'm interested in is:

Whether the students at University of Michigan are allowed to opt out of their own data sales, or:

Request a percent license of the profits from the University selling their work afterward?

happytiger2• 2 years ago

People really do not understand the value of their data. It’s incredible. They think in 10s and 20s, but the reality is 1,000s.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we owned the work we created instead of always having it assigned to the network nearest extractive company or institution?

Big money understands. Just look at how agritech data is getting locked up by companies — the value of the data is astounding.

Much of the university stuff is free for research or non-profit use, which is great, but if you want to use it commercially you have to pay big bucks. And not everyone who uses it commercially pays, let’s be honest. Ethical behavior isn’t the persuit of everyone in the management class.

EnigmaFlare• 2 years ago

There's an exchange of value - the organization that can use your data provides some value to you which is why use use it instead of just doing things on your own. You can actually just do things on your own and keep all the IP for yourself, even academic research in many low-capital-intensive fields - as long as you're actually doing it for the science and not for stupid credentials or stupid zero-sum career progression like most academics seem to.

I've often used university research commercially. I just read a published paper and apply it to my business. No permission, no payment, it's just wide open free for anyone.

janalsncm• 2 years ago

If you do the math, it’s about $15/paper, not thousands. And the papers are really only valuable in aggregate.

paxys• 2 years ago

It's a joke that they are selling it for so cheap.

carlystaff742• 2 years ago

The recordings in mp3 format, especially transcribed, could be quite valuable for testing.

ashton314• 2 years 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.

reaperman3• 2 years 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 [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 [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

1: https://lsa.umich.edu/eli/language-resources/micase-micusp.h...

2: https://ctdbase.org

3: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougeisner/

4: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI...

5: https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/eli-assets/elidocuments/MI...

6: https://ctdbase.org/about/legal.jsp

ipython2• 2 years ago

Great research! Hilarious that the dataset link you provided just happens to have the exact same number of texts available for download as are available in this "commercial" dataset:

Showing 1 to 20 of 829 papers

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Hilarious that the dataset link you provided just happens to have the exact same number of texts available for download as are available in this "commercial" dataset

I don't understand - didn't the GP say it is the same database?

costanzaDynasty• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

The not paying college students thing is changing a lot with new name and likeness rules

AaronFriel• 2 years 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/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.

whatshisface• 2 years ago

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

breather3• 2 years ago

Typically it's the recording and transcript that's copyrighted.

suddenclarity• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Surprising, how does that square with GDPR?

xphilter2• 2 years 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.

codingdave2• 2 years ago

US-based federal entitles have a completely different set of rules (See: 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.

lupire4• 2 years ago

Student homework is public domain in Sweden?

xphilter2• 2 years ago

They previously sold athlete data, no one should be surprised by this. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/sports/ncaafootball/weara...

carlystaff742• 2 years ago

Did not know that... Wow

ConnorMooneyhan• 2 years ago

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

breather3• 2 years ago

How did they get ahold of the copyright?

isotypic• 2 years ago

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

lupire4• 2 years 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?

lopkeny12ko2• 2 years 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.

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

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