Tech: Is devotee related digital content to be open source?

That is, freely distributed. Would like to have some feedback on it, thank you

Exactly, in my opinion KC digital material has to be released under a license similar to free software.

Reality check: how many people has the original Vedabase not the free hacked one, specially when prices are so high? You could charge for the mailing and some work to put the media easily available, the bandwidth costs, etc and make more profit.

Nothng is going ever to replace the hard copy, the books etc.

Also some people is reporting that after getting the free digital material they anyway want hardcopy and they will pay for that, or they become devotees directly meaning their whole lives are touched, thanks to the wonders of our digital information era.

What is our main goal? Make profit or make devotees?

I think that this conversation will benefit from clarifying the distinction between "free as in price" and "free as in freedom". Currently they are being mixed up.

Price is one thing. Copyright, which is what Creative Commons addresses, is something related, but different. Even if you have the most restrictive copyright on material you can still choose to give it away for free. Do you understand?

The Vedabase content is copyrighted, but how that copyright is exercised is a matter for the copyright holder. The BBT can elect to give it away for free if they want. Free digital copies can be achieved without changing the licensing. The BBT has already made a Virtual Prabhupada Bookshelf DVD with all Prabhupada's books on it in electronic form for a very low price for distribution on the street.

However, holding restrictive copyrights on material allows that material and its use to be protected. For example, Aerosmith used a BBT picture of Krishna dancing on the head of the Kaliya serpent on the cover of one of their albums. However, they had replaced Krishna's head with the head of a cat, or something like that. The BBTI was able to sue them and have the cover changed. Without a restrictive copyright this sort of protection would not be possible.

Creative Commons licensing is mainly designed to promote artistic freedom and cultural development. It's designed to allow derivative works (which is cool), remixing, and modification (which is not so cool with relation to Prabhupada's work). I think that allowing fair use of the BBT copyrighted material can achieve these aims, without the need to relicense it. *Some control has to be there* to be exercised when necessary. Ultimately it relies on the purity of the copyright holder.

A problem develops when someone misuses the copyright to unduely restrict it. We've seen that happen in the past where some people have tried to restrict who can and cannot purchase Prabhupada's books from the BBT to resell to the public. It can become political. Then the people who can't buy have to print them themselves if they want to go on with book distribution. This was a factor in Hansadutta's legal challenge to the BBT, which was partially successful. It's also one reason why H.H. B.A. Paramadvaiti Swami prints his own copies of Prabhupada's material in South America independently of the BBT. Another reason why he does this is the lack of BBT infrastructure and service in that region. He has written an interesting article "No copyright on Krishna". This paper addresses this problem, but fails to address the Aerosmith incident.

Hansadutta prabhu's legal challenge and other incidents have shown that there are a number of forces at work around the whole issue, and that there are checks and balances generated by these forces. No-one can claim complete entitlement. Leadership is established through contribution, and when someone tries to enforce an artificial monopoly, nature has a way of adjusting things and giving rise to fresh initiatives over time.

Creative Commons licenses encapsulate certain fair use practices, whereas at the moment in relation to the BBTI material they are discretionary, in other words they are not explicitly stated, and rely on the current BBTI trustees and the policies they set.

If you want to see creative commons licensing used in relation to devotee materials, then you have to generate some, license it under a CC license, and demonstrate what practical effect this has. I don't think that relicensing Prabhupada's work is an option, or even really potentially beneficial. What would be the case? As stated at the beginning - cost and copyright are two distinct things.

It's an intellectual exercise, because no-one has the authority to relicense Prabhupada's work. It has a working license, one that he established himself.

We would like to express our views, concerning some difficulty we are having at http://www.iskconmedia.com. We worked really hard putting together a nice photo gallery at this site. It contains many photos of our founder acarya, Srila Prabhupada and so many beautiful pictures of Krishna, His pastimes, etc… The BBT has sent an email restricting the site to use only twenty pictures, and other regulations. We can understand the need to have a copyright notice, but to force us to take down the whole website that contains more than 19,000 photos, why?

The reason, they say is for protecting Srila Prabhupada’s rights, but how? If they are referring to losing laxsmi on sales, it is proven that authors now WANT their work distributed widely on the internet. Why? When the author’s works is distributed widely on the internet, it becomes known, and people want the hard copy of it.

Take for example, Paulo Coelho’s strategy:
“ I use the internet for distribution. I released one book exclusively on the internet and we had an amazing one million downloads. But even though this is a high number, I didn’t receive a single comment on the book. No one was actually reading the book. In 2001, we had really no readers in Russia. My best seller, The Alchemist was selling a one thousand copies per year. And then it was pirated on Bittorrent and people started to download it. The next year it sold ten thousand copies, the following year, one hundred thousand copies, and today we have sold over ten million copies in Russia. “

Here are just a few advantages of the site:
Any devotee can print high-resolution pictures for their temple. We have not seen another web site like it.
We are now working on a word search, which you can search by locations, people, etc….
It is a fantastic way to distribute Srila Prabhupada’s photos on the internet.

On the other hand, what are the advantages of prohibiting us from putting on these photos on the internet as we are doing now? What could be the positive result of such actions? How does this restriction enhance preaching?

We would really love to hear your opinion on this matter.

their response at the moment is just pull 20 photos from bbt site and make it like this, meaning shutdown the iskconmedia photos site.
we are making further arguments and waiting for their response...

copy of letter sent:

Dear SriGaurangi Prabhuji,

Thank you for your kind letter.

We understand your point of giving value to our material, but that
doesn't apply to internet digital content; probably will be mostly
downloaded by devotees for a fair use and for the unfair use we
offered the idea to restrict the high res Krishna Art images, making
them on request only, in prevention of unauthorized commerce.

You're trying to apply copyright principles for the books etc but that
doesn't stand the present internet needs.

Right now, many thousand of authors are putting their digital content
on the internet for free, because they know that will catapult their
"hardware" sales, their fame and consequently their profit.

We see a great lack of perspective on those restrictions that you ask
us to adopt. There is far more to lose not putting this content for
free on the internet than the supposed drawbacks.

Suppose that 10 people get the Krishna Art high res pics and start
selling for profit without BBT authorization. That will be a drawback.
But how much more are we missing and ceasing to gain if we do not
expose the material on the internet?

There are literally thousands upon thousands of people that could get
the material and get "infected" so to speak, become devotees and give
not only donations in the form of programs, books, etc but some even
their lives to the sankirtan mission.

Regarding working with krishna.com, we are already helping many
webmasters and devotee websites, and krishna.com is very welcome to
get our help, the natural thing being they ask the ones that made it
better :) ) but that doesn't mean we have to "merge" our work or make
it disappear.

If you do not hold the authority to give the OK, please convey our
request to the person or the board with the power to do so. Please
show them our correspondence and arguments.

Looking forward to a fair and satisfying outcome.

Your servants at iskcontech,

There is an ongoing debate and problem with our site iskconmedia.com and BBT(i)

To date they have not responded our arguments against our knocking down the site

http://www.iskconmedia.com/photos

The last email was a plain "we are not going to discuss until you abide by the "20 photo" limit per site" which is a contradiction. If we take the site down, what is to be spoken about?

Attached below, you have the whole email exchange for the record, notice the last one, how they refuse to acknowledge our desire to continue via email.

Misra, quite frankly I don't understand what your problem is. What they ask for is fair and yes, necessary.

I work in the field proffessionaly (out in the "karmi" world) and this is very standard. They are allowing you to use the material, in exchange they are asking you to follow some simple guidelines. Please try to see the bigger picture here.

please find an update on emails with BBT(i) attached in txt file below.

they have severed email communication until we take the pics off (?)

and still no response to our arguments

I have been following this discussion with interest. Mishra prabhu, one question if I may, did you contact BBT(i) about your intentions of putting the material they protect on your site before doing so? Did you let them know or ask for tehir opinion.

It is after all true that they fight all the copyright violations there are on the material. Or are you somehow involved in that too? How do you help out protecting the material?

I have checked out your site and it seems mainly to consist of this material. Maybe you should think basing your site on something else. Something you exclusively have claim over?

It would also be interesting to know why you felt the need to put up such a site?

I read them. That's why I asked these questions.

Dvarakesh:IHow do you help out protecting the material?

probably the best way to protect digital content in terms of preservation in time is to distribute it widely. If you talk about protecting the content from being copied, that is just not possible.

Mishra, my main question was whether or not you contacted the main preserver of the said material before uploading to and basing your website on it. I did not find an answer to that in the correspondence.

Dvarakesh:Mishra, my main question was whether or not you contacted the main preserver of the said material before uploading to and basing your website on it. I did not find an answer to that in the correspondence.

anybody home?

Personally, because i tuly believe that anyone, anywhere who associates with Srila Prabhupada, the Great Vaishnavas and the Lord Himself via Shastra has begun the path Back Home, then posting such is an activity eternally and transcendentally beneficial for all participants. I ask with all honesty, does this not override mundane laws created in a country or countries, laws that are designed to protect creative and therefore monetary profits ? Is not the Lord arranging the hearing of such transcendental sound vibration ? Does He not arrange for any particular soul to be any particular place at any particular time in order to receive what is most beneficial for that soul according to that souls' desire ? I believe so... but i do submit these questions for your consideration.

May, 28
from Iskcontech to Pancharatna Prabhu and BBT(i):

This is our last email, explaining our understanding of the situation.
We have covered and explained the issue several times over by now.

- Regarding BBT(i) contacting archive.org, we have emails from the BBT
to other devotees showing that BBT contacted archive.org in relation
to us, while we were still in conversations, and other similar black
and white examples exist.

- We offer our services to all devotee websites what to speak of the
BBT. It seems that BBT itself is not asking for help. Your good self
has already used some of our services like nectarshare.com,
pariprashnena.com, wiki.pariprashnena and worldsankirtan google group.
How is that for cooperation?


> The BBT is not trying to stop anyone from putting their own Krishna
> conscious content anywhere, but only trying to protect Srila Prabhupada's
> property by exercising some basic controls.

So, if you are not trying to stop iskconmedia, what are we talking about here?
Your conditions are not "basic" but clearly elitist and crippling the
internet preaching.
We already asked BBT to give special arrangement as we do not fit any
of the possible offender categories, but remember: BBT has cut short
our conversations until we decrease the 20.000 photos to 20 low res
pics.


> All of these are great. But when there are two sites competing in the same
> market exclusive content is also very important.

You are talking about two physical shops in the same street, not about
the internet. You are talking about the Industrial age not the
Information Age.

Napster was closed and Bittorrent and a dozen similar clones were
created, so trying to stop digital sharing is a waste of time and not
very intelligent.

This is what is currently happening with music bands, famed writers,
etc. They have realized that more their digital content is freely
spread, more profit they make in the hardcopy sales and all the other
ways of monetizing.

We better adjust to the new paradigm or succumb to it.


CONCLUSION

All our problems are solved attributing a Creative Commons license to
the BBT digital material and having proper hard copy sale outlets.

CC regulates problems of piracy (copy and distribution for profit) and
manipulation of material by mayavadis, etc as this CC license does not allow such
actions -->> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Yes this is a very interesting one, as far as Shastra is concerned it cannot be copyright for obvious reasons, because the orginals belong to the history of India and existed way before the concept of copyright ever existed, purports could be copyrighted but why would you? Surely if your on a spiritual mission you would want people to freely copy and distribute, but then on the other hand what can be copied can be changed so you may want to copyright to make sure that any reproductions or references are done without any change to the originals (that is important)

As far as pictures are concerned the original copyright should belong to the person in the picture unless it was signed over to someone else as it is often done in the photographic world. However the form and picture of Jaganatha is said to liberate anyone who sees it, how can you copyright an image of God?

However if a devotee is an artist and paints an impression of an avatar is it fair to copyright and sell it? Well yes I think it is considering it takes a fair anount of talent to paint a good impression of a scene described in the vedic literature's.

Anyway welcome to the digital world, put it on the Internet and you will have a hard time protecting it, Hollywood with all its might is losing the battle with movie downloads, pirate movie downloads are sometimes available before the movie hits the cinemas. Sure they catch a few make an example but that doesn't stop millions of movie downloads everyday.