[Buddha-l] Conservative and liberal Buddhists

[Richard Hayes]

On May 27, 2010, at 7:06 AM, Alberto Todeschini wrote:

> 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.

I suspect you're right. Being the uptight raving paranoid sort of fellow that I am, I could hardly sleep at all last night. Every mouse who ran across the kitchen floor during the night sounded to me like the copyright Gestapo breaking down the doors to my house.

But seriously, folks (if I may quote Joe Walsh, composer of the unforgettable lines "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do"), as I gather around the water cooler with my academic friends to discuss the latest round of budget cuts to the university library, I hear more and more people voicing their disgust with academic publishers. More and more we find that authors have to do their own copy editing, their own proofreading, and even their own marketing for publishers that then sell academic books at elevated prices. So many of my friends are saying "Why should I put my work out through a publisher, when I could just produce my own pdf version and put it on my website?" This is especially attractive to those of us who have published materials with outfits that explicitly forbid us from publishing pdf versions of our own published writing on websites. The whole culture of academia is to make work available for others to see—the idea is to disseminate learning, not to hide it away and guard it as carefully as a toddler guards her last gumdrop.

The downside of self-publication, of course, is that one gets little credit from the bean-counters who have nothing better to do with their lives than to try to quantify how productive professors are and whether they deserve a virtual raise in pay. (I say "virtual" because salaries have been frozen at my university for several years, but we still have to go through the inane process of reporting how many earth-shatteringly important publications we have produced so that bureaucrats can determine how much money we would be given if there were any to give. Bah!) Things like tenure and promotion still hinge on shoving one's words through the mills of reputable capitalist publishers. This makes little sense, given how difficult books and journal articles are to change once they have been published, whereas a PDF file can be revised every time an astute reader like Lusthaus points out all the foolish things one has said. Conventional publications are frozen in imperfection. No non-self respecting Buddhist should go near conventional publications.

> 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).

Thanks for giving me more credit than I deserve, Alberto. Actually, I had never heard of Gigapedia. Thanks for the information. I'll look into it (and then let my inner Protestant feel slightly guilty about it). 

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

My guess is that if any academics were publishing books that brought in as much money as "Avatar" (the movie) or "Thriller" (the album), book publishers would be more aggressive. But let's face it, no matter how good Jan Westerhoff's latest book may be, it is not going to give Michael Jackson's estate a run for its money.

I'd say more, but the storm troopers are out in the yard with a bullhorn saying something like "We know you're in there, Shrubface. Come out with your hands tied behind your back, your ankles tied together and a noose around your neck!"

Richard