Buddhist Publication Society [Access to Insight] threatens to sue monk over freely spreading Dhamma.

DaltheJigsaw

EDIT: The holder of the copyright in this case is the Buddhist Publication Society and not Access to Insight. But it would be a great benefit to the Dharma if Access would support the free flow of information and support innovators like Noah in their pursuit of an open source practice. For contact info look to the comments.

The conversation of spreading the Dharma has been a hot one amongst Buddhists on G+. Recently a Buddhist monk reformatted the translation of "Path of Purification" provided by Access to Insight free of charge.

Personally I love Access to Insight but dislike most of the formatting (it is not mobile friendly and you can't download much if any of the content. I need to be at a computer to access it). My love for the work they do can be attested to the fact that I link diectly to them from this blog. But with the reaction of another Buddhist monk reformatted and provided accurate attribution of the work and sharing it with others free of charge, I wonder at their intent. Perhaps "Some Access to Insight" or "Access to Insight [but only from our landing page]" would be a more accurate title. The resulting "cease and desist " for spreading the Dharma from the Buddhist Publication Society [BPS] is unfortunate.

This, in short, is bullshit. Noah did not violate copyright and provided what Access was not able to do. I see no malice in his actions of sharing (and properly attributing) the piece and translation to the proper contributors. I have always respected Access for what they do in spreading Dharma but the action they have taken here is not in line with what I _thought_ their mission was. The actions taken by BPS seem to proprietary scent-marking.

If you wish no reformatting of your work then state it in your copyright.

As I can see now, all mobile versions of the work have been removed from the page leaving only a pdf. Again, if Noah presented this work and translation as his own, the BPS would be completely in their right. If they were selling the book and not providing it free of charge and then Noah posted this, they would within their right to sue. However, a free-work, unchanged [except for formatting, in this case a big plus] and properly attributed does not call for this sort of action.

Here is the cease and desist letter:

Dear Venerable,
John Bullit of Access to Insight wrote to me that you have unlocked the Path of Purification and put it online in different formats. This file was only to be distributed by Access to Insight and the BPS. We put years of work into this. Please take it off line or we will take action against you.
Bhikkhu Nyanatusita
Editor
Buddhist Publication Society

Only Access is allowed to spread their free Dharma. If you attempt to spread it they will sue you. The idea of an online sangha is that we provide resources and make them accessable to others. That is what a practice group does. By limiting this access to insight "Access to Insight" limits our work as a sangha, as a group. By pissing on this tree and saying it is theirs we lose connection to the teachings. When the Buddha taught he did not slam a copyright on the work, he gave it to us to interpret and spread. Noah did a good deed by reformatting the work and like all good deads, was promptly punished.

Remember. The Dharma is only spread through the proper sources. Do not attempt to make it too accessible to all or you may call down the wrath of lawyers.


http://greatplainsbuddha.com/buddhist-publication-society-access-to-insigh

Jeffrey

I wonder what motivated access to insight?

tmottes

How did Access to Insight start?
In early 1993, with the help of the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, I set up in my basement a computer bulletin board service (BBS) to see if networked computers might be genuinely useful as a support for students and practitioners of Buddhism. Originally dubbed "BCBS OnLine," the BBS soon joined DharmaNet's international network of dialup Buddhist BBS's and adopted the name "Access to Insight." Shortly thereafter, Barry Kapke launched DharmaNet's Dharma Book Transcription Project, of which I served as librarian, and under whose auspices about a hundred high-quality books on Buddhism were transcribed to computer through the dedicated efforts of an international team of volunteer transcribers and proofreaders. These books were soon distributed via DharmaNet to scores of BBS's around the world. In 1994 I installed a dialup Internet e-mail connection that allowed anyone on the Internet to retrieve these books via an e-mail file server. This proved to be a popular service. By late 1994 the BBS — now independent of BCBS — spent far more of its time serving file requests from around the world via the Internet than in handling the requests of local callers. Internet users from far and wide were coming to depend on Access to Insight's now rickety and overworked '386 computer as their link to information — both the timely and the timeless — about Buddhism. In March 1995 this website was born; eight months later I closed down the BBS for good.

Today Access to Insight continues to grow: what began in 1993 as a modest collection of two or three suttas and a handful of articles has blossomed into a library of more than one thousand suttas and several hundred articles and books. With the release of the Handful of Leaves CD-ROM in 1998 and 1999, these texts are now reaching an even wider audience and being further redistributed around the world in print and electronic media.

To explore ATI's history in obsessive detail, see the archives of old news summaries.

tmottes

Are these texts protected by copyright?
Yes. You may copy and redistribute any texts from this website, provided that you abide by these two basic principles:

You may not sell any texts copied or derived from this website.
You may not alter the content of any texts copied or derived from this website. (You may, however, reformat them — see below).
The files on this website are made available to you thanks to the generosity of dozens of authors, translators, publishers, and transcribers, all of whom contributed their efforts with the explicit understanding that the fruits of their labors would be given away free of charge, as an expression of dana. You may download these files to your computer, print them out, read them, share them with your friends, copy them to your own website, translate them into other languages, and redistribute them electronically — provided that you do not charge any money for them. They are not in the public domain. You may reformat the files as you please (see below), but you may not change their content without first obtaining permission from the author, translator, or publisher.

Some texts contain additional copyright notices with specific additional rights and restrictions spelled out by the authors and publishers; please read and abide by these notices. If you reprint or republish any of these materials, please acknowledge the original author, translator, or publisher, as appropriate.

Please ask me if you have any additional questions about the copyright status of anything offered here.

Jason

I'm a big fan of Access to Insight and the Buddhist Publication Society, but this is a bunch of petty bullshit, in my opinion. You can read all about it at Phra Noah's blog, Truth Is Within, particularly here, here, here, here and here.

tmottes

It is just a single guy that runs the site. I am not sure if that bit about the varied copyright notices was there before you brought this to my attention. He is rather adamant about not charging for any of the information on his site. He seems to have good intentions (I have corresponded with him in the past), perhaps he is just covering his own behind from a overzealous publisher?

dharma

Here is a link to a previous discussion on this topic that someone posted:

http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2306&sid=7d7b5a95db8ae7132835b8026c01a766&start=20

Hello,

Jack kindly informed me about this thread. I have been a member of this forum from the start, but because of many other duties with respect to the Buddhist Publication Society (BPS), of which I am the English editor, etc, I have little time and had not noticed this thread.

As regards the question why the Path of Purification is not put online for free: It will be put online as a PDF for free on the BPS website and the Access to Insight website. Hopefully somewhere next year when the newly typeset and slightly revised printed edition will be put out.
Those who quickly scan in books and put them online as PDFs such as the Russian who scanned in the latest edition of the Path of Purification (1991) and put it online without having asked for permission to the BPS (Manapa gives the link) don't realize the huge amount of work it is to proofread, format and typeset a book, especially a large and complicated book like the Path of Purification with its many headings and styles, etc. They also don't realize the cost of printing and distributing the book and the cost of maintaining an non profit publishing organization such as the BPS.

The Path of Purification printed in by the Corporate Foundation of the Buddha in Taiwan, to which one of the posts in this forum refers, is a photocopy edition done without the permission of the BPS. The Corporate Foundation of the Buddha is careless with respects copyrights and has photocopy-reprinted several BPS books such as the Great Discourse of Causation by Ven. Bodhi without seeking permission to the BPS.
The BPS is generally lenient in giving permission to reprint its books and regularly gives permission to organizations in Malaysia and Singapore to reprint books for free distribution. The BPS is also making all of its Wheel Publications and some other books available online on its website (http://www.bps.lk/onlinelibrary.asp), a project which I have been organizing and which takes a lot of work. Many BPS books are also viewable on Google Books. The problem with putting larger books online is that it takes a lot of work and funds to produce them and there is the concern that organizations such as the Corporate Foundation will use the online digital files to reproduce the books without asking permission and that the BPS and its distributors in the US and Europe end up with stocks of books which can not be sold because everybody has already got the free books from our Mahayana friends in Taiwan. Another problem with making books available online for free is that everybody starts to copy it to their own websites with little effort, and sometimes without properly acknowledging the source website.
I hope to find some kind of middle way between making Dhamma books available online for free and on the other hand keeping the BPS going as an organization dedicated to publishing Dhamma books.

Regards,
Bhikkhu Nyanatusita
Editor
BPS

I thought Noah had discussed it with PBS before he did it , but I guess he didn't. However, I don't think it is skillful for others to send his dhamma brother a message saying that he will take action. They are suppose to cooperate and help each other share the dhamma. There is no need to take action against another sangha member for sharing dhamma. They are only able to provide these dhamma texts in web formats, but nowadays many people are moving to the more portable mobile formats with the release of mobile devices and iPad. Noah is delivering it in the format that people find useful.

Perhaps they should cooperate , that way they can share the dhamma more effectively and making it available in various formats.

DhammaDhatu

:-/

Fell

This only encourages me to STOP reading Buddhist texts. I was suspicious before, and even more so now. Meditation, meditation, meditation...

Cinorjer

As a writer and published author, I have a few views on the subject. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from creating their own pdf or ipad versions of these sutras. If you want to get that sutra out there in a different format, then gather some copies, do your research, do your own translating and formatting, and start typing your own document instead of using someone else's document. Nothing whatsoever is stopping you. Then you can do whatever you want with it, in whatever format. But you won't do that, because it's a huge time consuming and expensive project. However, people don't have any problem with stepping in once someone else has done all the hard work, without asking permission.

The holder of the copyright didn't just take some previously written books and scan them into a computer. He took the time to create his own unique translation of the work. Now, if the copyright holder had given permission for people to put his work in whatever format they want, then that's all they needed. But you can't simply ignore copyright.

Those who quickly scan in books and put them online as PDFs such as the Russian who scanned in the latest edition of the Path of Purification (1991) and put it online without having asked for permission to the BPS (Manapa gives the link) don't realize the huge amount of work it is to proofread, format and typeset a book, especially a large and complicated book like the Path of Purification with its many headings and styles, etc. They also don't realize the cost of printing and distributing the book and the cost of maintaining an non profit publishing organization such as the BPS.

And before you go on a rant about how the Dharma should be free, almost every intact ancient sutra exists because some rich patron commissioned copies to be made. The monks certainly charged for their services. In some cases, that was an important source of income. The scrolls were not given away free by the temple monks, and even royalty had to commission copies for their own libraries or were expected to return favors.

The rest is just the typical lawyer generated "cease and desist" letter. Nothing special.

dharma

I think the " cease and desist" comment is harsh, but there is a need to at least notify them first or communicate with them.

I would suggest that the dhamma be distributed for free, but the problem that we have to face is how to maintain a publisher when they are not getting enough income through donation. I don't want to see them close down because they produce high quality material that I enjoy and I am sure that others are as well.

Cloud

It just goes to show that even "free" has costs. These organizations go out of their way to provide freedom-of-sutra for a lot of people, and it takes money to grease the wheel. With the money and effort put in, that organization at least expects that its translations will be presented officially by them. They're not being stingy or withholding dharma for money... they're only asking for a little bit of respect for the huge undertaking that it truly is. Asking permission isn't that hard, and providing a link to their material from your own site isn't difficult either.

I don't think they should sue, but they should press to make sure nothing of theirs is hosted on sites they haven't given permission (which the laws would uphold action being taken to do).

vinlyn

To me it's not a simple situation. Yes, I can see when someone has spent money on a project that there should be remuneration for the work being used. But on the other hand, did Access To Insight pay Buddha for his teachings? Gee, I think not. Oh, that's right...Buddha forgot to copyright his teachings.

dharma

I think the book should be posted on Access to Insight just like other suttas, but they should make it available for sale on Amazon and iBooks also. That way the book is available on in all formats and the people that wanted to support them can do it by purchasing their books. Others can read them on Access to Insight if they want to. I don't know if this can keep them from having to close down and be obstructed from offering their services. I wonder how are they doing financially? Anyhow, no monks should be sued for sharing the dhamma.