發信人: b83050@ccstudent.ee.ntu.edu.tw (Post Gateway), 信區: BudaTech
標  題: mail from Japan
發信站: 由 獅子吼站 收信 (Tue May 28 10:05:48 1996)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 18:04:26 +0800
From: Shann Wei-Chang <shann@math.ncu.edu.tw>
To: b83050@cctwin.ee.ntu.edu.tw
Subject: mail from Japan

David,

I got a reply from Japan who was accusing us copying their text in
"our site".  Actually I don't know what are the files he was talking
about, are they on ftp, gopher or your WWW?

Anyway, here is his mail.  Since you are the manager, I shall let you
handle it.

Thank you.

-Shann

===========
>I am sorry if some of our services offended you.  But I truely dislike
>your impolite, or even rude tone.  If you are really a person who
>follow the budda's way of living, you should not talk like this.

I am sorry if I offended you; I assumed that the language had to be simple
and strong in case the person in charge would not read English well. I also
reacted a bit strongly because someone in Germany has recently started
SELLING our data for profit.
>
>Please indicate what files of ours "duplicated" your "copyrighted"
>texts, and please prove, in whatever sense, how your "electronic texts"
>are "copyrighted"?

The texts were input at our institute in seven years of work; we do this
work in the interest of people like you and distribute our information on
CD-ROM (sent for cost of postage and handling, US$10) and on the internet.
All we ask is that nothing is changed.

>> You have no permission to put our texts on your server.
>> However, you can place pointers to our WWW site and our tools.

I may not have expressed myself clearly enough. Let me explain.

We indicate in the headers of our electronic texts what version they are,
what original text we used, what the level of error correction is, etc.
To distribute the electronic texts through one central site (best where
they are created) has the advantage of letting the users always get the
latest updates.
For example, several of the texts which were placed on your server are
already obsolete versions. Some were in the meantime put in Big-5 code on
our WWW site. And some are going to  be updated in the very near future (we
are in the process of producing concordances of these texts and are
therefore correcting the data in ten or more passes).
What we want, and the users, too, I beleive, is trustworthy data: one knows
what they are, where they were input, how many times they were corrected,
which printed text they stem from, how the missing characters are coded,
etc. All of this information is supplied in the headers.

But how would anyone know this if someone cuts the headers off or otherwise
alters the content of the texts? Electronic texts without headers are like
books with ripped out title pages.

One may argue that one should not put insufficiently corrected data on the
internet.
However, we are using a lot of manpower and money and effort to produce
good quality electronic texts. In the interest of researchers and other
users, we decided to make input data available; but to prevent a mess (i.e.
lots of users who don't know which version they are using) we are attaching
a header to all texts so that the content and origin is clear.
Just as with freeware programs one wants the program distributed unaltered
and with the original documentation, we want our electronic texts
distributed the same way.


>In general it is more efficient to simply give an anchor in the HTML
>page that points to the most original document.  But in some situation,
>for instance the efficiency of network transportations, people mirror
>other sites' documents.

Mirroring can be done with parts of sites or entire sites. If the
communcation speed is
insufficient or traffic too dense, this definitely makes sense.
However, as you know, mirroring is done by agreement of both parties; and
once the
agreement is made, the mirror should be updated periodically.

Please let me know if downloading through our Tokyo site and Kyoto disk
array is too slow or otherwise troublesome.

>If you really don't want people
>to freely distribute your documents, you simply don't put them on
>the internet!  The spirit is fair and share.

That's exactly the policy I am pursuing here; so far, virtually all of our
materials (newsletters, our concordance series, the Electronic Bodhidharma,
etc.) have been distributed free of charge all over the world, including
Taiwan. My major aim is quality information and data; and the internet is a
godsend because distribution is so much easier. Free distribution is in the
interest of the user; so is good after-donation service. The user should
know what he/she gets and where the updates are.

Please report this to the manager of your site.

Yours,

Dr. Urs App

P.S. The download page for our latest files is:

www.iijnet.or.jp/iriz/irizhtml/zentexts/cdtexts.htm