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--></style><title>Re: [KS] DB of Korean Classics</title></head><body>
<div>Let's just clarify what we are actually talking about. That
clarification is then already a very good part of such a
discussion.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>First things first:</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>1.</b> Protecting old texts without copyrights (from being
downloaded, possible being republished elsewhere), THAT was really NOT
the issue in the earlier emails. The protection issue we had there was
about a website that has done something with such texts ... right?
These texts do not just march all by themselves from various libraries
and private collections to some server's data base? Those texts are
originally not electronically searchable. Those texts could originally
not be copied as 'text' but just be viewed on paper. The institute had
someone type the texts of all those documents, then, over years,
produced translations into modern Korean language as well (at least of
the documents I saw), then created various other helpful tools--e.g.
texts by year search. All that is a lot of work, even for one single
document.</div>
<div>The old texts are not copyright protected--that is also my
understanding. But again, that really was or is not the issue here.
The issue is clearly that of asking how to hack a site in order to
"steal" someone's (or some institution's) work--the labor
that was put into preparing these texts, in some cases annotating
them, translating them, typing and/or otherwise converting them,
making them searchable on the Web.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>2.</b> Protection vs. public access: The institution that
created the "DB of Korean Classics" seems, from what I can
see, have decided to allow public access to all the texts as a
searchable data base, text as text, and not as scanned image. (Or are
there indeed somewhere download links?) That is their decision, and
that does make the institution to continue to act as some sort of
gatekeeper. Otherwise they could just disassemble their own institute
after the job is done. If that had been a project by e.g. a public
library, then maybe that is how it would have been indeed have been
done. But this is really not the end user's decision. I see that
Harvard, for example, made 473 rare Korean books available for
download in digital format. But these are then not searchable, just
scans--no comparison as regards to the manpower that the above
mentioned institute put into their own project, not in scope
either.</div>
<div>Also, there are just so many institutions in Korea that allow all
kind of documents and publications to be accessed ... a great list of
links is at:</div>
<div>http://www.kostma.net/eng/main/main.aspx ("Gateway to
Korean Studies Materials," here the Engl. version). I find all
this rather amazing, in a very positive sense.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>The kind of protectionism that Professor McCann mentions, isn't
that mostly limited to materials that relate to contemporary Korean
politics and economics and especially to materials about North Korea?
E.g., IPs from outside of Korea are blocked from accessing a number of
otherwise public or semi-public data bases, or a Korean resident
registration number (chumin tūngnok ponho) is required to get access
to them, etc. That development goes certainly hand in hand with newly
implemented and re-implemented censorship measures, quite considerable
censorship policies for a democracy, and that is due to the
conservative trend under the present government which seems not to
trust itself and its own citizens. Probably also "ahistorical"
but I find that certainly also a little depressive (still have to
figure out how to be more "historically depressive").</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><b>3.</b> Technical aspects -- Windows and Mac: please see my
summary, left site at http://koreaweb.ws/4_computing.php . Korean
programmers, and form a few years back I have some direct working
relations there with one of the companies that created several of the
major Korean studies data bases in Korea, tend to have usually some
sort of hacker's mentality. What I mean here is not at all meant in a
morally negative sense!! I mean "hacking" in a Urban street
talk understanding of digital problem solving--programming without
caring too much about international standards. As a programmer, when
you want to achieve a certain task, you can just put a few tools
together, new ones and long outdated ones, and add some of your own
code that then solves the immediate problem for this one
task/website/data base. That has, at least from what could see, been
the mainstream approach in Korea, and also in parts of Europe, and
that is a very different approach from what you normally see in the
U.S. If then, however, any of the major software developers such as
Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Linux, and other free networks
come up with an upgrade of e.g. a browser, following published general
policy standards (of how e.g. to code a Java application), then these
"hack" solutions run into problems, are not anymore
compatible, AND, more important so cannot quickly be fixed by their
programmers because the entire code base is a mess that violates all
kinds of standards. As you have all noticed, on Korean websites you
often are limited to use 'Internet Explorer' as a browser, and even
there it maybe an older version (e.g. 6, or 7 -- newest is 9). a lot
of sites still rely on already mentioned "activeX" which is
not supported by e.g. Firefox or any Mac browser, and Internet
Explorer is not anymore produced for the Mac--last version 2001
(http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Activex). For most of the Korean
websites where Mac users have problems, missing activeX support is the
cause. In other cases it may simply be required to change the text
encoding from e.g. "UTF-8" to the (outdated but in Korea
popular) "euc-kr" mode. I also noticed that there are
various "reader" versions, not just for HWP documents (where
there finally is a new free reader for the Mac) but there are also
altered Adobe PDF Readers that only work on Windows, again no way to
create these for a Mac because of "activeX." There is no
technical necessity for such kind of programming, not since we have
Unicode. And they may disappear, just not sure how long that will
take.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div>Frank</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
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<div>--------------------------------------<br>
Frank Hoffmann<br>
http://koreaweb.ws</div>
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