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Re: Copyright in China

I do not read Chinese, but based on the article in the NY Times and my own
experience with bootlegs in Asia, I doubt this was a parody.  Our
experience many years ago at Encyclopaedia Britannica in doing even an
authorized translation into Chinese was a doozy.  As for the comment that
"it should not be difficult to design systems to ensure and compare the
integrity of documents," I wonder who is going to do all this easy work,
when they will do it, and on whose budget.  I am not saying that the work
is hard and that it won't be done; I just want to know how it is all going
to happen.  The related question is who is going to organize this work,
how it will be managed, and to whom the management is held accountable.  
In other words, all the things one takes for granted in a commercial
environment.

Joe Esposito


On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:54:33 EDT, Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca> wrote:

> When the information is available for free, there is less incentive to
> copy and resell, particularly for commercial purposes.
> 
> If there is enough free information available, there will be very little
> incentive for piracy, period.  When the highest quality copy of an
> article is already free, no one is going to go looking for a reduced
> price.
> 
> Considering the ease with which text can be scanned and OCR'd, it seems
> more likely that this will happen with restricted-access information.
> Easier to sell - and harder for the potential customer to check the
> reliability of the information.
> 
> As Jean-Claude points out, it should not be difficult to design systems
> to ensure and compare the integrity of documents.  It is easier to do
> this with open access, as it is not necessary to get past authentication
> mechanisms in order to make the comparison.
> 
> As for the book from China, based on the described changes, I'm
> wondering if this is truly piracy, or a parody - which, with a change in
> title, might have been perfectly legal in the U.S.?
> 
> best,
> 
> Heather Morrison