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Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2012 3:53 am
by tiltbillings
yuttadhammo wrote:
tiltbillings wrote:Interesting indulgence in a bit of ugly nastiness from you. But interestingly enough, you make my point:
I apologize, you are right about the nastiness. I guess I was just responding to your "hand waving and huffing and puffing" - which is nastier?
Your comment: SN i 162.
tiltbillings wrote:And such an endeavour requires a considerable amount of funding, which is far easier to accomplish in a country that is 95% Buddhist as opposed to a country where the Buddhists of all sects might be somewhere around a bit less than 1%.
I disagree... the Path To Purification (the text in question in the link in the OP) was transcribed by Western volunteers at ATI, edited and formatted by Western volunteers at the BPS and then distributed on the Internet by ATI. Wisdom Publications translations of the suttas were translated by a Western monk who ostensibly doesn't need royalties to do his work.
If Buddhists in the West are capable of paying textbook prices for hardbound volumes, they are certainly capable of making them freely available online (or at cost offline) to people who are less affluent (i.e. most of the Buddhist world). At the very least, they could stop threatening to sue people who do.
If your argument is really that Buddhists in the West are just too poor to fund such an endeavour, then by all means, they should be sending their material to be printed in more affluent countries like Thailand, Sri Lanka and Burma.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. The fact of the matter the millions of books given away every year in Buddhist countries reflects a fact that in Buddhist countries where 95+% are Buddhist there is a significant infrastructure and a support base for something like that as well as a vastly different merit seeking ethos than we have in the USA where less than 1% of the population are Buddhists and most of those are converts. It will take some time these things to change.
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Fri Sep 07, 2012 7:43 am
by Hanzze
Don't forget that the revegetation needs to be financed also at least. As long as we learn from it and change our ways, jet the wheel turns in the right direction...
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2016 5:28 pm
by Exactly
I too find it strange that the dhamma is not free. I don't think Bhikkhu Bhodi took any money for translating the canon. And I think his intention was to spread the dhamma. Or am I wrong ? Does Bhikkhu Bhodi take % of sales ?
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Sun Oct 30, 2016 10:54 pm
by Caodemarte
There is copyright on free dhamma publications and other to prevent others people copyrighting the text and then selling it (yes, this happens) and then suing the original author for using the material! It is also designed to stop people altering the text, passing it off as their own work, using the free material commercially, or other abuses.
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Mon Oct 31, 2016 12:28 am
by samseva
Exactly wrote:I too find it strange that the dhamma is not free. I don't think Bhikkhu Bhodi took any money for translating the canon. And I think his intention was to spread the dhamma. Or am I wrong ? Does Bhikkhu Bhodi take % of sales ?
Wisdom Publications needs to stay in business. If it doesn't make profit, it will close and other Dhamma publications won't become possible. Without copyright, anyone can take all of Bhikkhu Bodhi's work, print it out and sell it for half or a quarter of the price on Amazon.
Bhikkhu Bodhi isn't personally earning money off of this, since he can't according to the Vinaya. The purpose of profits is simply to funnel this money into even more projects and running the current things in place.
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2016 2:44 am
by davidbrainerd
mikenz66 wrote:
Ironically, publications that are produced for free are often more difficult to obtain than "commercial" volumes.
As the saying goes, there's no free lunch. Just because it was free to you don't mean somebody didn't pay for it. A lot of this "free" material ends up out-of-print, therefore rare, and then people seeking it find what was originally "free" listed for like $400 on amazon or ebay used.
Re: Copyright on the Dhamma
Posted: Wed Nov 02, 2016 3:24 am
by mikenz66
davidbrainerd wrote:
As the saying goes, there's no free lunch. Just because it was free to you don't mean somebody didn't pay for it. ...
Quite right. I should have said "produced for free
distribution". Obviously someone paid for printing, mailing, and so on (in addition to the work involved in producing the document in the first place).
Mike