From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:36:29 -0500

Just to be clear, I was talking about "piracy" in the more narrowly
defined sense that Joe advocates here. For examples, see this article
about some recent cases:
http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202545430299&Publishers_Mount_Strategies_to_Target_EBook_Pirates

Sandy Thatcher


> 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