Re: FOS Newsletter Excerpts

From: Joseph Pietro Riolo <riolo_at_VOICENET.COM>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 20:27:51 -0500

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_cogprints.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Note that (1) this is a speculation on the part of Joseph Riolo, that
> (2) it is based entirely on developments in the non-give-away sector,
> the very sector to which all the goings-on in this Forum are explicitly
> NOT addressed, and that (3) in the give-away sector (refereed research
> preprints and postprints) all the evidence to date (10 years and
> 180,000 papers in physics, 500,000 papers in computer science, and
> countless other publicly archived preprints and postprints in home
> websites across disciplines) has been -- without exception, and for very
> good reasons -- in the direction exactly OPPOSITE to the one Mr Riolo
> "won't be surprised" that it will go in future.
>
> Hence Mr. Riolo's opinion, though he is free to express it, is at best
> overwhelmed by empirical evidence to the contrary, at worst completely
> irrelevant to the literature in question.

It is very well known that the majority of copyright holders are
very selective. They don't go after every unauthorized copy they
can find under the sun. When they feel the impact of unauthorized
copies on their control of their intellectual property rights, they
will initiate the legal actions. The number of papers you mentioned
is very small and does not make any great impact for many more years.
For now, they are nothing and do not make a great dent in the
control of the copyright holders.

The empirical evidence do change, for better or worse.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo_at_voicenet.com>

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this
post in the public domain.
Received on Sat Dec 08 2001 - 01:50:24 GMT