From: Zac Rolnik <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:47:28 -0400

Sorry for the late response to this interesting question, but I have
been traveling....

In terms of the piracy issue, while it is annoying for smaller
publishers we simply do not have the resources to fight it.  When we
find a pirated version of one of our titles, we immediately go to the
source and they typically take it down, for it only to pop up
somewhere else.  Very frustrating.  So this is one issue where we try
and let the big publishers (who have more skin in the game) take the
lead and we act as free-riders.  In addition, there are some who think
for a small publisher it might actually serve to promote our titles,
since most of our customers want to buy the version of record and
those who get pirated copies would probably never buy it anyway - but
might encourage their colleagues and libraries to look at it.

Zac Rolnik
now publishers


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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