Sarah Blackmun wrote:
Does anyone else think it is unethical (as well as illegal) to digitize
works that are protected by copyright?
It can be unethical and illegal in some cases, but Taran Rampersad, whom
you seem to be answering was only speaking using Optical Character
Recognition with texts photographed in the library.
- If the digitalized copy is for your personal use and study, it is legal.
- If the work copied is in the public domain, it is even legal to
distribute it or put it online.
- What would be illegal would be to distribute and/or put online a work
protected by copyright
Don't the writers and producers
of intellectual and artistic property own their works and have the right
to control how they are distributed?
Yes, but copyright laws allow readers to make a personal copy for
studying purposes. And a text version is far more handy for studying
than a PDF. Not to mention that blind people will anyway have to
translate PDFs or image formats into text, by using OCR.
(Don't Google and Yahoo and the university libraries know this? Of
course they do!)
Not exactly: the Google project was halted precisely because of the
copyright issue. The Très Grande Bibliothèque Nationale of France so far
has only scanned and put on line PDFs, which seem locked - and the ones
I have seen are all in the public domain. I have not seen the Yahoo ones
Do we have on this list any authors in the group who depend for their
livings (or a part thereof) on the royalties they receive from books,
music, film, etc.? And will they continue to publish such works if they
can't receive a fair recompense for them?
I do - to a small extent, granted: royalties on 2 anthologies I
co-edited in the 80's. The rest of my writings don't produce royalties:
I was/am paid a lump sum for translations, most editing jobs and
prefaces. So I don't care a hoot if folks digitize these texts.
Actually, I have done so myself, and banged them online, when the
publishers remaindered the paper editions.
Ever since Creative Commons licenses appeared, I have put what I write
online under a CC license: by NC (non commercial) - at times also SA
(share alike), when I felt like p...ing off some likely plagiarists. On
the whole, it has worked fine: got far more paid translations to do
since then.
What will be the long-term impact on intellectual and artistic
production if everything is in the public domain as soon as it is
published?
Mistaken assumption. There were pirate editions before digital age: ask
Oxford University Press or any academic press whose books got merrily
pirated and sold at 1/4 of the price in some countries; ask authors old
enough to remember being translated and published without authorization
or royalties in USSR. Well, USSR relented in the end and did give
royalties: in rubles, and it was forbidden to export them. So the
writers would go to USSR and have a luxury holyday on their royalties,
buy some furs (though for the better ones, you needed to pay in dollars).
So yes, there are digital pirates. But if anything, making pirate
editions on the scale that was practiced with paper editions in USSR and
other countries is more difficult in the digital age, because if they
get offered online, it's easier to nab the pirates.
BTW the above obtains for music and videos too, up to a point: there was
already a thriving pirate industry for cassette and videotapes in Italy
before the digital age, for instance. The problem with music and videos
is that big producers like RIAA are now digitally "protecting" there
works, which means that non-tech-minded users can't make a legitimate
personal copy for their own use, while tech-minded folks wishing to
break the law override the protections without problems.
cheers
Claude
--
Claude Almansi
Castione, Switzerland
claude.almansi_at_bluewin.ch
http://www.adisi.ch
http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Claude
http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/claude
http://www.digitaldivide.net/community/languages
NB La mia messaggeria di posta elettronica è impostata per rifiutare
e-mail di più di 200kb.
Per favore, se *dovete* condividere un file pesante, mettetelo online e
mandatemi l'URL (si può fare con http://www.rapidshare.de ad es).
NB My e-mail client is set on accepting only e-mails under 200kb.
If you *have to* share a big file, please put it online and send me the
URL (you can do that at http://www.rapidshare.de , for instance).
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