International copyright law and the Chinese medicine community

[Guest guest]

Hi All,

 

 

 

This is in response to asking Z’ev Rosenberg to name his top 3

herbal, formula, and pathology websites.

 

 

 

http://www.fenwick.com/docstore/Publications/IP/Advanced_Copyright_2008.pdf

 

 

 

This is a very large document about the penalties of copying

material from websites that are copyrighted. 

This is something that in the digital age, is taken lightly, but it is

something we should all think of when we see something on another website that

we want to include on our own personal computer.  This document cites court

cases in the

European Union as well as the United

States, and discusses the penalties for the

loser as being in the millions of dollars.

 

 

 

As we become more and more of an established profession, copyrighted material

will affect our profession more and more.  With the implementation of including

countries

like China

in the WTO, no longer can Chinese material be plagiarized by Westerners without

securing a license of some sort (exclusive, non-exclusive, etc) to redistribute

this material.  This is something most

companies understand, but most individuals do not.

 

 

 

What does this mean for us all?  I hear all of the time that material should

be free within our profession, but if that is true then all of that free

material has to be self created, and then given to the community, and cannot be

directly copied from any source.  Yes,

there is fair use, but fair use comes with the citations of the source, the

author, and with the copyright intact.  What

this means is that there is the potential to pay a great cost if one is caught

breaking copyright.

 

 

 

I would like to talk about several disconcerting things I

have seen over the last couple years. 

 

 

 

First, the pirating scandal that happened where someone

copied multiple books from Eastland, Blue Poppy, and Paradigm and put them all

on a

single DVD and resold the DVD for a profit.  This is old news, I know, but it is

also a

case where the FBI is involved, and when that person is found, they will be

going to jail for a long time.  This was

disturbing not just because it caused the publishers and authors to lose money,

but it hurt us all as a community.  When our 3 main publishers lost so

much money due to this single instance of piracy, they scaled back on the number

of books that they were producing for

us – the consumers. Some authors and translators lost their jobs, and were

forced to take other jobs – which means that our field lost their expertise.

 

 

 

Second, about a year ago, I was at a professional meeting

where the president of the organization told me that he was scanning all of his

books into his computer using OCR software.  This was disturbing because it is a

blatant

copyright violation.  When we buy books

from our publishers, it is with the understanding that we can read and enhance

our minds with that knowledge, we can leaf through the pages, and otherwise use

the book, but we cannot recreate the book – nor digitize the book.  It is up to

the individual publisher, to take

action against the individual through a lawsuit, but more than likely once the

judicial system is involved, at least from the court cases I read in this

document, the damages would likely be per book.

 

 

 

Third, recently I was at CSOMA, there was a student there

that was showing people his version of the Q-Puncture software.  He was telling

people that he got the software

from a friend of his who is a programmer, who just wanted to see if he could

crack the program.  This student was then

giving copies of the program to his friends.

 

 

 

These stories are disturbing, because they hurt our entire

industry, maybe not on the surface, but when sales are decreased through

piracy, it lessens the amount of money any one publisher/ company has to invest

in new information for our community.  The

idea that information is free, is just not realistic, because someone at some

time had to invest the capital or time to create that information originally.  

 

 

 

I found this article above today, and after following the

discussion titled: Statistical Classification of Symptoms and

Diseases -- I thought it was a good thing to post.  I had also been disturbed by

these two events

that I had witnessed personally, and I thought I would put that out in our

community for discussion.

 

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

L.Ac.

 

The Database

 

Chinese Medicine

 

www.cm-dbcart.com