[Buddha-l] Conservative and liberal Buddhists

[Alberto Todeschini]

Richard Hayes wrote:

>  I'll put a copy in my public folder and send a link later. But I'd really like to know whether it's legal to do that. I don't want a bunch of JAAR lawyers breathing down my neck saying that words are policemen. Any legal experts out there?

I'm not a lawyer but from what I've heard from the music and movies
world, I suspect that legal it ain't (in the US at least, most other
countries have saner IP laws) because you are willfully making something
available with the specific intention of letting people download it.

As you know, one can find hundreds of academic books on Buddhism via
Gigapedia.com and Scribd.com (the former will give you links to
file-hosting websites, the latter actually does the hosting). Indeed, I
think through gigapedia you'll find literally hundreds of thousands of
books on every imaginable topic and a few unimaginable ones.

Routledge and OUP, who provide pdfs of their books, appear extremely
quickly after publication, e.g., Westerhoff's translation of the
Vigrahavyāvartanī.

It's a fascinating phenomenon and I'm surprised book publishers haven't
been more aggressive, as record and movie companies have been.

Regards,

Alberto Todeschini (happy Ubuntu and Dropbox user)