That there is a lot of piracy of scholarly monographs there can be no 
doubt any longer, now that scholarly publishers have been tracking 
illegal postings for years. (Penn State Press, which I headed, had 
its best-selling book--a translation of a Buddhist text by Columbia 
scholar Robert Thurmann, father of Uma--repeatedly posted without 
permission at multiple sites.) What is more difficult to measure is 
what impact this has had on actual sales, since people who download 
from such sites may not have had any interest in buying these books 
in the first place.  Do teachers assign these books to students by 
providing URLs to these illegitimate sites?  Who knows?

My guess is that the problem is greater for one-offs like books, 
movies, and music than it is for journals, however.  I doubt that any 
pirate is going to find it very profitable to try posting every 
article of every issue of a journal over a long period of time.

The greatest danger of piracy for movies, however, is not the theft 
of Hollywood blockbusters but rather the films produced by 
independent filmmakers, who rely on advance funding from overseas 
distributors who need to be guaranteed that movies won't be stolen 
before they are even available for licensing in foreign markets. 
Without that assurance, foreign investors won't provide the funding 
that is needed even to get a new movie project off the ground. hence 
it is not so much a matter of lost sales as it is, for these 
filmmakers, of inability to make movies at all. Read more about this 
problem here under "Copyright Piracy and Its impact on the U.S. 
Intellectual Property Community":  http://www.ifta-online.org/issues.

Sandy Thatcher



At 9:48 PM -0400 3/18/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>From: Ann Shumelda Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2012 21:43:27 -0400
>
>TED talks are very trendy these days, and often very interesting.
>Here's an analytical treatment of the question of financial losses
>through copyright piracy, a video whose URL has been making its way
>around the internet in the last couple of days -- and I shamelessly
>stole the link from one of these several lists:
>
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0&feature=youtube_gdata_player
>
>This tongue-in-cheek presentation makes me ask:  is copyright piracy
>really a problem for scholarly publishers?  Subscription journals?
>Monographs?
>
>If so, how would we know how large the problem is?  More than that --
>how would we know if it were big enough to worry about?  See, what is
>true in the video is that a lot of the estimates of future loss are
>based on a future that isn't known.  Anyhow, don't scholarly publishers,
>at least of e-journals, expect some leakage and don't our subscription
>prices pay for that?
>
>Thoughts?  Ann Okerson


-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher
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"If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying."-John Ruskin (1865)

"The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people 
who can write know anything."-Walter Bagehot (1853)