My Two Cents on the Buddha Torrents Discussion
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.
