Re: Pirates vs. University Presses

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Does the end justify the means? With attitudes like this, it's no 
wonder that university presses are suffering from piracy, too. 
And unlike the Harry Potter books, which will still sell millions 
of copies even with piracy rampant, scholarly books often have 
very small markets, which can easily be completely destroyed by 
such piracy.  Does Mr. Graf want to see a world where no presses 
exist and all the publishing becomes self-publishing by scholars 
and peer review is done after publication?  That is a sure way to 
exacerbate the problem of information overload from which we are 
all suffering too much already!

P.S. We presses would, of course, welcome a world in which our 
parent universities completely subsidized our operations, so that 
we could publish everything free to the end user. But does 
anybody know of a university that is willing to do this?


>Spreading knowledge is the same like stealing a book? If the law
>says this it is something wrong with the law.
>
>Klaus Graf
>
>2009/2/19 Joachim Engelland <joachim.engelland@engelland.com>:
>>  I am surprised by the question mark.
>>
>>  There is also no legal difference between stealing a scientific
> > book or a collection of poems from a library.