Re: Copyright in China

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

As for the book, I haven't seen it, and so cannot say whether this
particular item is parody or bootleg.

Joe, your assumption seems to be that it will be necessary to protect
documents against piracy, and that this will be more important with open
access.

This simply does not make any sense.  When the information is free, there
is no incentive for piracy.

You are also implying that quality requires production in a commercial
environment.  From my viewpoint, there is no correlation between quality
of work and production by a commercial entity.  A great deal of scholarly
publishing is done by nonprofit societies and/or or university presses,
both of which are known for the quality of their work.

The commercial sector does produce quality published materials; it also
produces sensational tabloids.

To sum:  quality information can be produced by either the nonprofit or
the commercial sector.  The commercial sector can produce information of
either high or low quality.  Therefore, there is no correlation between
quality of information and commercial publishing.

This is not to say there is no role for the commercial sector in the open
access environment; of course there is.  BioMedCentral is both a
commercial entity and a leader in the Open Access movement.

If there is a contest for ludicrous arguments against open access, I'd
like to nominate this one!

best,

Heather Morrison


On 27-Oct-04, at 7:07 PM, Joseph Esposito wrote:

> 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