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
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