My Two Cents on the Buddha Torrents Discussion
by Danny Fisher
Our pal Justin Whitaker has a post at his fantastic blog American Buddhist Perspective about Buddha Torrents and the reinvigorated discussion around it in light of a recent request from Shambhala Publications that they cease their practice of posting “links to Dharma books (and similar items like yoga DVDs) that have been – most certainly illegally – uploaded to the web.” (As Justin reminds us, another pal and my Shambhala Sun Space editor Rod Meade Sperry blogged about the hot button issue two years ago.)
Justin points out (and a cursory glance at the site itself will show) that many of the texts are also academic works of Buddhist Studies, which are very often published under circumstances quite different from popular titles.
I’ve been following the posts and all of the comments, and would like to chime in about it all with a few things that have struck me in all this dialogue…
- First, comparisons to the music and film industries (from either side of this) seem problematic to me. Those are industries, of course — and huge, commercialized ones at that — whereas academic presses (and, by and large, the boutique Buddhist presses) are more like knowledge/information services. As Justin suggested, academics and academic presses don’t do what they do to make big piles of money. (As working academics, you can trust Justin and me on that.) Academic publishing does require paid professionals and a certain amount of overhead, though, and without those things that kind of work (at least as it presently stands) would come to a complete halt. Academic presses operate on a comparatively razor-thin profit margin; at the end of the day, what they do and they way they do it stands in stark contrast to, say, what they do and how they do it in Hollywood or Nashville. In particular, illegally posting monographs and other specialized texts to sites like Buddha Torrents punishes the wrong people entirely…
- …And on that note, I don’t really buy the basic premise of the creators of Buddha Torrents — that sites like it are all about the democratization of information. Really? Who is it that can’t find this stuff, or feels like they don’t have access to it? And have they tried looking anywhere other than Google or Amazon? If you want everything to be digital, I think that’s unrealistic. We’re just not there yet technologically. But if you’re willing to go analog, the democracy is largely already in place. Go to your local libraries. In most cases, they’re great. Interlibrary loan at your public library should be able to help you. (WorldCat can literally help you track down the nearest available copy of a text.) Academic libraries may not lend books to an outside user without that person paying a fee, but you can still go in, pull texts off the shelf, and find a quiet spot to read at most of them. (Right now, I happen to be visiting a town of about 4,500. There’s a small liberal arts college here. I could walk in, browse their relatively good Buddhist Studies holdings, and read something all day if I wanted to. I could even become a full community borrower *at no cost* if I had an address anywhere within the county. There’s also a small public library in town where I would have options as well. And don’t get me started about the opportunities at libraries in Los Angeles, where I live.)
- [UPDATED: I've changed a few things in this chunk for the sake of clarity. In looking at one of the comments below, I was concerned that my intention here was not clear.] There’s an implicit Marxist ideology that shows up in various places in this discourse, and that surprises me. To be clear, I don’t mean Marxist as a put-down here; it’s merely a way of characterizing how some in this discussion have talked about production and access to the products of labor. I’m not sure anyone explicitly name-checked Marx or Marxism in the comments I read (I’d have to look again), but aspects of Marxist ideology seemed apparent to me in some of the dialogue here. I’m happy abandoning the word if readers don’t find it helpful. My only real point, in short, is that I think it’s quite unusual to espouse or implicitly invoke an ideology that might be described as “Marxist” (or something close to it) when one is really talking about acquiring private properly illegally. If we’re talking about truly sharing these works (like, say, with other patrons in libraries), with everyone enjoying largely free and open access to these texts, there’s really not much of a problem beyond better educating the public about their options through libraries and other services. So, as far as I can tell, the only trouble anyone could have would have to do with not being able to own one of these pricey texts as private property…and that doesn’t seem to square with the stated ideas and goals here. In the end, I really think this is all much less about “access” than it is about finding ways to acquire personal copies of these works for nothing. As I see it, there’s a pretty big difference between access to a text and this kind of acquisition.
- Using libraries to their full advantage benefits everyone, really. Readers get access to works they want to read, authors and publishers aren’t compromised, and no laws get broken.
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“A lot of the vaguely Marxist language that pops up in this discourse surprises me: unless this is about owning pricey texts, what’s the trouble?”…Maybe labeling something as “vaguely Marxist” does not lend to a dialogue on this issue of torrents and Buddhism.
Erik: Just to be clear, I don’t mean Marxist as a put-down here. (In retrospect, “implicitly” might have been a better word than “vaguely.” Maybe I’lll fix that.) I’m not sure anyone explicitly name-checked Marx or Marxism in the comments I read (I’d have to look again), but aspects of Marxist ideology seemed apparent to me in some of the dialogue here.
My point, in short, was merely that I think it’s unusual to implicitly invoke an ideology that might be described as “Marxist” when one is really talking about acquiring private properly illegally.
Once again, you need a “Like” button. If they’re posting texts and other material for free and don’t have permission to do so from the creators or publishers of those materials, it’s theft, plain and simple.
My local public library here in Bangkok has no English language section at all and the “Religion and New Age” section of the only bookstore I’m aware that carries English language books consists of about 16 feet of shelf space, most of which contains “Last Days” pot-boilers
. So if I want a book, I have a few options: wait until my next trip to the US or the UK (right now, about a year away); buy it at Amazon or someplace similar, paying $30-40 for shipping + duty; have the local folks order it for me (an ordeal that I’m somewhat unwilling to repeat) or try to find it in ebook form. So in answer to your question “Who is it that can’t find this stuff, or feels like they don’t have access to it?”: sometimes, me.
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© 2009 Danny Fisher All Rights Reserved
Heya Danny – thanks for the mention and your thoughts here. I like the idea of libraries, and that came up more in the comments at my blog too. As I’ll write more about in a follow-up though, that still leaves a lot of people without access. Also, I didn’t mean to compare academic publishing in isolation with the music or film industries, rather the whole of publishing with the whole of music/film. Both have their big-money centers and their poorer niche markets (academic publishing might be more like the jazz or classical specialty record labels)…
Re Marx – I think the owner of Buddhisttorrents uses Marx in his comment on Rod’s post (saying something like “the Dalai Lama is a Marxist…” in a response there). Your point about ownership is interesting though. I’ll try to address that too in a longer follow-up
Lots of grist for the mill. Thanks again!
Can you provide citation? I looked again and I don’t see that part you quote. But. Then I am blind from one eye and I might have missed it.
Hi Erik – Here’s a snippit of the Buddhatorrent guy’s response at Shambhala Sunspace:
“Ethically the whole matter is in the grey. I do not subscribe to Capitalism. If you give it any thought you will see that this system we all live and work in is part of the deluion we are trying to escape. My philosphy follows a more socialistic outlook. Free healthcare should be as universal as free dharma.
The Dalai Lama himself is a Marxist.”
The whole thing is at: http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/?p=6923
Best wishes, jw
Just to clarify a bit. I do consider myself a Marxist and a Buddhist. So, personally, I don’t take it as offensive or a put down, but in the grander discussion of the blog sphere, it’s usually starts a “flame war” that detract from the overall response. Mis dos pesos on this.
Not everyone in this world has the privilege or access to library’s.
You may be cloistered in a fancy Buddhist University with access to every Buddhist book ever written, but a lot of this world is not American.
Many also do not share your narrow ideology.
Hans and One Breath: Fair points about difficulty on the international scene. (I was thinking more about North America, where, as I thought I pointed out, you actually don’t have to be “cloistered in a fancy Buddhist University” to have access to these books.) Still, we’re left with the question: is stealing the answer? (Or putting it on the internet at all: presuming everyone has a computer or access to one is presuming a lot.) I think an alternate method would be helpful, but we need scholars and publishers to participate in figuring that out.
However you feel about it, this is the future of information. It’s more important to deal with the reality of it, then to get lost in the morality of it.
MWT: While I agree that the future is digital and strongly disagree with any notion that suggests we simply jettison morality, I think the simplest argument is being glossed over here: if we don’t figure out a way to do it digitally so that academic enterprises are sufficiently supported, then there won’t *be* any academic materials to illegally scan and put online.
Danny, you equate “putting it on the internet” with the word “stealing.” Is that actually true or is this buying into the (questionable) notion of “intellectual property”?
If someone is stealing, they have generally taken something from another person and deprived them of it. That is never the case with digital content.
Inappropriate or unlicensed access is not the same as “stealing.” One would be a civil matter, legally, and one would be a criminal one.
We live in a legal system that *had* decided that unlicensed use is theft but I still find it to be quite an assumption as someone who lives a large part of his life interacting with hackers and online culture.
I actually never equate “putting it on the Internet” as stealing. I equate doing it without permission of the author and publisher as stealing.
If it’s work created expressly for profit (even marginal profit) and protected by copyright law, and it’s taken and reproduced and distributed without permission of the author or publisher, then, yes, that’s stealing. It would be like walking into Barnes and Noble, taking what you wanted, and trying to leave without paying, saying, “Oh, well, I don’t believe in intellectual property, so…” That’s not going to work.
It is not BuddhaTorrents’ work to decide how to distribute. Going through the looking glass the other way, it’s why you don’t see these scholars and authors and publishers showing up at our doors demanding our creative work or family pictures or whatever and saying, “Gimme those, because they’re mine and I get to copy and distribute them however I want with no permission or input from you.”
Whether one agrees with the notion intellectual property or not or copyright law or not, they hold legal weight right now. So, technically, until the law changes, it seems like this is pretty clearly stealing.
I’m actually more sympathetic to the underlying needs here than I think people think. But this has got to get figured out in conjunction with authors and publishers, otherwise there won’t be future works to share. (And they seem game enough: Shambhala Publications’ letter is incredibly reasonable, and they’re willing to help people who feel unable to have access to their materials. That’s a good start, knowing that.) I have lots and lots of problems with the capitalistic system, but it’s the one we’re dealing with at the moment, like it or not. So if by stealing this material, academic and boutique presses get financially hurt, you’re actually inhibiting the ability for there to be available in any published form work by professional thinkers. I feel confident that some good solutions that benefit readers, writers, and publishers could be found if there was some careful thought and discussion by everyone involved.
I believe that you missed my main point.
There are quite a few people that feel that “intellectual property” is a mistaken construct and that there should be no such thing. The fact that our legal system has created this definition and then treats misuse of materials created by others in the same manner as, say, someone stealing a physical object, such as car, does not mean that it is a *good* legal construct. These people feel that it enshrines something as something it is not.
Again, in this viewpoint, pirating materials is not, legally speaking, “theft”, because no one has been deprived of an item. If someone’s car is stolen, then they lose the use of their car, because the physical object has been taken. If an mp3 file of a song has been pirated, no one has loss the use of it. All that has been lost is *potential* (not actual) revenue because the creating party then assumes that they have lost a sale. My legal memory is a little vague at this moment but I believe that is really a different quality of thing, regardless of how our current legal system enshrines it, then the act of physical theft.
The Buddha clearly spoke against taking things not offered. The “things” in that circumstance would have been phsical items, such as food, physical goods, work animals, gold, etc. How do I take your mp3, for example, away from you?
That is why many people think that there needs to be a reexamination of underlying notions here. Until that happens, large segments of the population that do engage in piracy are going to dismiss arguments that equate what they are doing with physical theft. They are unconvinced and repeating it to them does not convince them.
I also want to add a response to one statement that you make:
“It is not BuddhaTorrents’ work to decide how to distribute.”
Buddha Torrents isn’t distributing anything. You may consider this hair splitting but, by and large (and I’ve looked), no one involved with that site is uploading anything pirated to the Internet. *Other* people are doing that (and you can find the stuff all over if you look).
All Buddha Torrents is doing, effectively, is pointing to this content that other people have uploaded and saying, “Hey, look at this over here.”
You may consider that just as bad but it is a correction worth making since it has (potentially) ethical implications (they aren’t putting material up, just mentioning it when people tell them) and it does actually have legal implications (it isn’t illegal, as proven in court fights, to point at third party content with no other involvement in its creation).
Al:
First of all, great to finally meet you in person at #bgeeks11!
Fair enough on your first point about Buddha Torrents not being the one that does the actual scanning. They’re not exactly helping the situation, though, either.
As to the other point, I don’t think I misunderstood you. I just don’t think intellectual property is a mistaken construct. Or copyrighting. And it’s about way more than just revenue. Among other things, it’s what keeps me from claiming falsely and with impunity, “You know ‘The Dark Knight’? I wrote that. So you should give me a job as a screenwriter.” Or exploiting you by taking studio photographs that you might have taken (at cost to you), slapping them on t-shirts, and making a fortune on that with no responsibility to you whatsoever.
I understand the criticisms of these concepts, but, frankly, they consistently fail to take the long view or equitably weigh the consequences (like the collapse of the academic publishing industry), in my opinion. Also, as I said in my last comment, people are resorting to illegally scanning and downloading without exploring other options first (at least with Shambhala Publications). That’s just silly. There should be a conversation with authors and publishers first. They might surprise you. What’s happening now is the bull in the china shop approach.
Like Rohan said in his talk at Buddhist Geeks, “I’d rather things be sustainable than free.” Given the circumstances we have to work with, illegally scanning and downloading this material just isn’t going to lead us somewhere sustainable. That needs to be recognized.
It was excellent to meet!
To be clear, I’m not advocating a particular approach here. I’m just illustrating points. I run a hackerspace nonprofit as my evening “job” and I swim in this water every day between that and working in Silicon Valley.
Also, to declare myself, I happily pirate material that I have bought. I have something like 12,000 or so books in my home. I want to replace those with paperless options but I’m not going to repurchase an entire library (which isn’t really an option anyway). If I bought the book in the first place, I see no moral conflict with downloading a pdf of the same text, regardless of source. I *paid* the publisher and author already and a format change is not worth paying $12.99 (or, more often, $39.99 for Buddhist academic books) again.
I’m not worried about the collapse of the Academic publishing industry as much as the non-Academic one. Academics publish for many reasons and most of them have little to do with making any money from book sales. They publish to make a name, get tenure, get research public, etc. The fact that Richard Payne’s latest work is only available from an academic publisher for $250 a copy means that they aren’t targeting scholars actually *buying* these works (and no library has it to lend to me anyway since I’m not in academia at the moment).
The popular Buddhist press is more of a problem. Jack Kornfield, Ethan Nichtern, and others. I don’t have a solution there.
The taking down of Buddhatorrents won’t change anything. All the content they link to is still there after all. They’re just talking about it.
“I don’t have a solution.”
Yeah, me neither. Like I said earlier, I’m more sympathetic to the concerns here than it may seem. I think the next logical step is a conversation between all interested parties. Where that leads, I don’t really have a good sense.
And, yes, again, Buddha Torrents has become the flashpoint here, but most of the comments seem to have more to do with those they’re pointing towards.
For what it’s worth, I think you should worry about academic presses too. They’re not *just* about puffing up professors and helping them with tenure and showing off what they’re doing. That’s too myopic a view of what that industry is about, I think. It’s a passion project for most of those involved with these presses that I’ve met, and really all about the democratization of research. (How lovely that important, game-changing research done by a scholar at, say, Oberlin, which might not find an outlet in the popular press, is still able to be read by students and others at academic libraries around the world because of these presses’ efforts.) That seems like something Generation “Get Everything Out There and Accessible” should be sympathetic towards.
You mention:
“That seems like something Generation ‘Get Everything Out There and Accessible’ should be sympathetic towards.”
I agree but when academic books are $100 to $300 each, you can’t really call it “accessible.” I mean, I *really* want to read this http://www.amazon.com/Esoteric-Buddhism-Tantras-Handbook-Oriental/dp/9004184910/ as it covers one of my research interests with a cross-selection of people but $303 for a copy? I’m never going to get it unless I’m attached to Stanford or the like.
I had to pay UMI extra to make my Master’s thesis available online as a free PDF (http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1472152931&Fmt=2&clientId%20=79356&RQT=309&VName=PQD). There are ways to get research out there on the net. They just won’t make a publisher money.
Again, as I said initially, ownership and accessibility are two completely different things. Academic presses know they don’t make money on individual purchases; they’re generally priced for libraries.
“I’m never going to get it unless I’m attached to Stanford or the like.”
And, again, many academic libraries have lending programs for community members not affiliated with the institution. (I know that’s true in the Bay Area.) In many cases, they’re free. And a lot of public libraries have interlibrary loan programs so excellent that you might find a copy that way. Make sure to do your due diligence investigating this.
I’ve looked the text up on Worldcat. GTU has a copy that I can walk in a peruse. None of the other libraries listed, as far as I can tell, do interlibrary loans. I can put it in the system and see what comes up but, no, it isn’t really accessible unless I want to spend a day or three hanging out at GTU and hope no one checks it out.
I’m well aware of lending programs. I have some academics texts sitting next to me right now.
“I’ve looked the text up on Worldcat. GTU has a copy that I can walk in a peruse. None of the other libraries listed, as far as I can tell, do interlibrary loans. I can put it in the system and see what comes up but, no, it isn’t really accessible unless I want to spend a day or three hanging out at GTU and hope no one checks it out.”
That’s part of my point. That’s accessibility and sharing. Ownership is something else.
You really think people will do that if they see that there is a PDF of it online and they can download it instead?
That’s exactly my point: so if you don’t involve publishers and authors in the process of figuring out how to get their work to PDF form, then those presses will fold and there won’t be homes for for work from scholars (and no more work to illegally scan and download). That’s the part supporters of Buddha Torrents seem to me to be incredibly naive about.
This is a side quibble.
Most of this work isn’t “illegally scanned.” It is almost all, for the academic texts under discussion, works provided in electronic format to Universities that is being taken *outside* of the University context. The actual digital formatting is being provided by the publisher but only given to specific institutions that pay them tens of thousands of dollars a year for (supposedly) temporary access to the work.
In general, I don’t think the Buddhatorrents adherents are being naive. They just aren’t worried about the future. They are here, now, and works are available with a little bit of piracy, so they are taking advantage of this.
By and large, they aren’t authors, scholars, or publishers. They aren’t concerned about the publishing ecosystem of ten years from now.
This is kind of like saying that the people trading mp3 files on napster in 1998 are being incredibly naive. On the one hand, sure, they are. On the other hand, as history has shown us, they won that battle and, eventually, accessible legitimate copy was made available, legitimizing their fight in the first place (which the industry fought against tooth and nail).
There is rampant ebook piracy right now. This is not a Buddhist problem. This is a book industry problem. With the advent of ebook readers, people are trading in books after stripping the DRM and they strip the DRM, in the first place, because it is an attempt to keep people from actually owning electronic books, even if they pay for them.
Again, self-disclosure, I own a kindle and buy a lot of kindle ebooks. I also strip the DRM off every single one of them and archive (and back up that archive) a copy of them. It’s takes me, literally, a few seconds to do. Why do I do it? Because Amazon has shown (and Apple would do the same thing) that they are happy to remove the books that you paid for from your devices at their discretion and also because of the idea that when I buy a book, ebook or not, I have purchased it, not semi-permanently leased it at the discretion of the publisher or distribution channel.
The ebook industry is where the music industry was in the late 90s. Until they learn from history, this piracy and trading is going to continue, rhetoric about it being stealing or not. The users aren’t going to care about complex philosophical arguments, especially when they see an ebook edition of a text being offered at an unreasonable price but they can find the same book, drm free, for the cost of nothing.
Again, this isn’t an endorsement. This is a recognition of the reality of the situation.
I just said they were naive on that point, not in general. I also
mention in the post why I think it’s wrongheaded to compare this debate with the music and literary and film industries.
I saw that. I just disagree.
Hence the naive comment. : )
Another way to look at the Buddhist Torrents site is from a journalistic perspective. They are not hosting these files or uploading them. They are reporting on the items and their locations. A few changes in the wording of their posts could easily make it sound more journalistic. Would they get journalistic protection then? It could make an interesting legal challenge.
One aspect of the intellectual property and theft debate that I have a hard time swallowing is that of loss of revenue. If downloaders were taking these copies and selling them then I might be somewhat persuaded to agree. But that is not the generally the case. I recall maybe a dozen years ago or longer this issue came up with software piracy. People were copying discs and selling them for a fraction of the retail price. Organized groups made quite a big profit from that. Still happens in some places, especially with videos now. In India it’s pretty much the only way most people view movies. Street vendors sell them by the cart load. Then came a lot of copy protections and online registrations, etc.
One can regulate and prosecute up the yin-yang but that’s not going to stop it. And all the coercion of ISPs by copyright control bodies, be they publishers or groups representing them, via government will not stop it either. That’s some of the Net Neutrality debate.
There needs to be a new paradigm. Not only for content users but for content creators and distributors as well. I recently researched out and read the entire history of Wisdom Publications. It shouldn’t have been that hard for those people to do what they did. Many people sacrificed a lot to get that going. I know it’s true for other small publishers as well. I get that.
I also understand how they might feel knowing people are benefiting freely from all that effort.
I made a suggestion at one point somewhere that perhaps some of these publishers actually offer a free download or two per month of some of their older works. This could be accompanied by coupons or something for future purchases. It is essentially free advertising across the globe in that way. That’s the first thing I thought of but no doubt with the creativity available in the open-source, hacker, maker communities as well as within academia and the public at large there are many other ideas that could be tried.
The points that would have to be covered would be remuneration for content creators and distributors and open access to that content.
Maybe someone could offer a challenge to come up with more ideas. I don’t have a big platform from which to try that but many others do.
The point is rather than forcing an adversarial position, particularly from a legal standpoint, an attempt at a cooperative one is worth a shot.
Personally I would prefer that libraries would be greatly expanded and were used for all information exchange but I know that’s not going to happen any time soon with libraries often being one of the first community institutions to be on the chopping block for budget cuts.
Ideally I would like to see a global digital library which contained all the published works by humanity collectively for all time, from which anyone anywhere could borrow and research freely. It could be collectively held by everyone via a Torrents-like scheme so no one nation could monopolize or restrict access. Also not going to happen any time soon but it’s one of my favorite dreams.