LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
Links: Harry Potter Piracy
Posted by Steven Wu on Monday, July 14 @ 10:40:53 EDT Copyright
The New York Times reports that the latest Harry Potter book has been pirated, with teams of scanners and proofreaders from around the world translating the text to digital format--and sometimes translating to other languages also, well before the official translations were due.

Book piracy (the digital variety, that is) is not, as the article occasionally suggests, a brand new thing. But it is true that the technology for pirating books has taken longer to catch up than the technology for pirating music, and even movies. What is unusual about book piracy is that, even with more advanced technology, it generally takes a lot more effort to digitize a book than to digitize a CD or a movie: not only must somebody actually sit down and scan hundreds of pages, but then somebody else must comb through the resulting file and proofread to remove all the errors that even the most advanced technology can’t prevent. These efforts become even more impressive when readers not only digitize a book from another language, but also translate it. It sometimes makes you wonder why translations take so long when a group of volunteers, working for free, can churn out something in a matter of days.

Read the article here.

 
Related Links
· More about Copyright
· News by Steven Wu


Most read story about Copyright:
Top Ten New Copyright Crimes

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Re: Harry Potter Piracy (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, July 15 @ 15:30:24 EDT
Learning Perl (3e) and other Perl books were translated to Traditional Chinese by Taipei.pm.


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Harry Potter Piracy (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, July 15 @ 19:13:11 EDT
I recall reading an offhand account of some book which
was translated into French and sold as a new work. Since
every word had been changed from the original (including
title and character names, I gather) the copyright case
didn't get far.

Wish I could remember more details.


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Harry Potter Piracy (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, July 18 @ 11:21:40 EDT
CDs and DVDs are already digitized. that's the format the come in.


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.220 Seconds