Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
they need be, precisely because of the effort required to track down and
find the IP owners. In its response to the Gowers Review, the British
Library called for a 'light touch' system that would protect such projects
from litigation, provided that a reasonable amount of attention was
given to finding the owners of orphan works.
Finding the balance between the need to prevent copyright theft and
the non-commercial needs of the academic sector is not easy. With
justification, many publishers are concerned about copyright
infringements, in particular, digital piracy. Websites such as Pirate Bay,
Minova.org, isoHunt.com and Torrent Reactor allow users to search for
and download BitTorrent files (torrents), small files that contain
metadata necessary to download data files from other users. Other
pirate sites make a wide range of e-books available for illegal download,
although publishers may take comfort in the reported fact that the out-
of-copyright
Kamasutra
tops the list of the ten most downloaded books
on BitTorrent in 2009.
2
To highlight the extent of a the problem, the
following is an extract from a discussion on an open web forum:
Is there any site from where I can download free ebooks? I don't want
public domain and classic ones. I want bestsellers and really exciting
ones.
If you download uTorrent, you can download books to it from
mininova.org all in about a minute. I did that yesterday because I
couldn't find my freaking book.
3
A final and unique issue concerns the sharing of academic research. In
scholarly publishing, the author of an academic article does not seek
remuneration from the publisher, but rather recognition. The researcher
freely gives his or her work to the publisher, and thus it might be
argued that the researchers should also be free to share their (often
publicly funded) work with their peers for scholarly purposes. Some
journal publishers, on the other hand, would argue that the editorial
and peer-review services that they provide cannot be sustained if
authors freely share their content on the open web. Some publishers
seek to prohibit authors completely from disseminating the peer-
reviewed article and demand exclusive rights, while other publishers
allow the authors to disseminate their work through their own websites
