From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:08:35 -0700

I recommend that this thread make some distinctions about different
uses of copyrighted material, as the word "piracy" can be a blunt
instrument.

I personally only use the term "piracy" when someone uses copyrighted
material without permission and then attempts to monetize this in some
way.  An example of this would be local coursepack companies.  There
probably is a lot less "piracy" of this kind than many would suppose.

I use the term "unauthorized use" instead of "piracy" when there is no
direct monetization.  A professor who takes a copy of a paper he or
she has written that was published by a traditional publisher and puts
that paper on a personal Web site may indeed be an unauthorized user.
Obviously, this varies with publishers' policies and how one construes
the privileges under fair use.

There is a third undefined category where the monetization, if any, is
indirect.  Google's mass digitization project is an example here.
Google was not planning to sell the copied texts, but it benefits from
those texts in it data-mining initiatives.  Of course, here again fair
use may plan a role.  Leave that one to the judges.

Most of the time when people talk about piracy, they really mean (in
my terms) unauthorized use.  I am not making a case for unauthorized
use, but there are differences here that should be acknowledged.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 6:13 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2012 22:50:24 -0500
>
> 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