Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uccba!uceng!dmocsny
From: dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Summary: Paper: defender of intellectual property
Message-ID: <364@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 1 Nov 88 22:47:24 GMT
References: <300.236DAA95@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG>
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg.
Lines: 37

In article <300.236DAA95@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG>, postmaster@mailcom.FIDONET.ORG (Bernard Aboba) writes:
> Not to mention the copyright problems, which many publishing firms have 
> already concluded to be insurmountable.

As electronic publishing methods mature and provide convenience and
capability far beyond printed media, we find our concepts of intellectual
property to be preventing us from taking advantage of these benefits. My
main quarrel is not with the publishers of the Brittanica, but with the
firms that profit from the sale and distribution of scholarly journals.
The authors of these works do not usually derive any royalty from them.
Furthermore, most of the work is publicly funded, and the authors want
to obtain the widest possible exposure. The system we have now, that of
relying on private companies to typeset, print, and disseminate the
journals, has worked well enough in the past. However, these companies
exist to serve the technical community, and not vice versa. If electronic
publishing can help the members of the technical community share results
with each other more effectively, then we must remove legal barriers
that interfere with it.

That does not have to mean bankruptcy for the technical publishers. If
they took the lead in organizing the infrastructure for electronic
dissemination of the research literature, they could provide better 
service for the same price that the average institution pays now
for its journal subscriptions. Their costs would be lower and their
profits higher. Instead, they will probably sit on the fence and
continue to render our information less available via paper, until
we take matters into our own hands, adopt markup-language standards,
and distribute our own literature free of charge over our own networks.

Mass-market publishers have a different sort of problem, because they
do not serve a community of peers. I.e., a real distinction exists
between producers (writers) and consumers. Since the writers are
profit-motivated, they need paper to defend their intellectual property
rights. At some point, however, the utility of printed information
must become so much lower than the utility of electronic information
that paper will lose its advantage.

Dan Mocsny