Mechandising electronic texts

[n-iyanag at ppp.bekkoame.or.jp]

At 0:34 AM 2/28/97, Fco. Javier Martnez Garca wrote:
> Dear Members,
> Prof. Gippert has asked me to post following message to the list:
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dear colleagues,
>
> today I received an offer from a company in Munich ( H. Boessow PARK
> GmbH, Widmannstr. 11a, 81829 Muenchen) which sells the following
> electronic Sanskrit and Pali texts on disks at prices between 20,- and
> 150,- DM:
>
> Rgveda, Sathapathabrahmana, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Pali-Kanon,
> Arthasastra, Manusmrti, Brhatsamhita, Buddhacarita. Kalidasa4s Meghaduta
> is offered as a free extra.
>
> It can hardly be accidental that all these texts have been made
> accessible via the net for some time. I wonder whether any one of us who
> endeavoured a lot preparing such texts to make them publicly available
> should agree in this kind of third party merchandising. I should be glad
> to receive comments from everybody interested in order to decide what we
> should do about that.
>
> Jost Gippert
> gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de
>

and

At 8:29 PM 2/28/97, Muneo Tokunaga wrote:
> Dear Indology Subscribers,
>
>   My e-files of the MahAbhArata and the RAmAyaNa still contain
> many typing errors, as a matter of course.  It is indeed a lifelong job
> to perfect an e-file of such a huge text like the epic. I thought
> it was my obligation to continue doint it and I was just preparing
> a new version for the net in cooperation with my student M. Sugita
> when I heard about a commercial disc of them from a company
> in Munich. Now I realize that good-will is simply a source of unexpected
> troubles in this world. So I have decided to make future versions of
> my files available only in a limited circle in order not to cause further
> complexity. Those who are satistied with an imperfect version of
> the e-file are free to buy that disc.
>

Dear Professor Tokunaga and Dear Indology Colleagues,

I find that this is a VERY alarming situation.

I understand very well the feeling of Professor Tokunaga, but I think
that this is not only a trouble that happens to him, but to all the
Indologist community, and more generally to all the researchers
working in the fields of humanities.

If the files that that campany in Munich is intending to put into their
CD-ROMs are taken from the free on-line e-texts that are the results of
incalculable and invaluable efforts of many scholars -- and I am almost
sure that this is the case, and I think that it is not very difficult to
prove it --, even if they don't intend to make commercial profit from
their CD-ROMs, they MUST ask the permission of the authors of these
e-texts to do so. If they don't do that, we should all do some action to
stop their piracy. Free and on-line e-texts are so important for all of
us that we should do all what we can do to protect them and their authors.

I don't know for the moment what *I* can do personally, but at least I
would like to repeat all my gratitude to Professor Tokunaga and the
authors of the other e-texts, and also, I would dare ask Professor
Tokunaga to not limit the distribution of his e-texts -- and encourage
him to fight against this piracy, because, I am sure, all of us are on his
side...!

Best regards,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan