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On the assumption the objection may be from the photographer--we haven't heard from them directly, as far I as know, though Cory's on vacation and not available--we've removed the CC-licensed image. We support the Creative Commons and will always do our best to honor the creator's interpretation of non-commerciality. We haven't really thought through CC non-com stuff on pages with advertising at BB as a matter of policy--it's on each poster's conscience. But I know that Cory often seeks permission directly from photographers on flickr, and that other editors do likewise. Thanks, any many apologies if we have err.

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

It's up for debate as to whether or not BoingBoing is receiving "monetary compensation" for "exchanging" your work. Yes, it's next to ads, which they're being paid to display. But they're not being paid to display your image. At least, not directly.

...check out the list of CC Friendly Lawyers at creativecommons.org. Somebody might be able to offer advice that doesn't involve suing the infringing parties.

The documentation for SugarCRM Community Edition is located here: Sugar Community Edition 6.0 Documentation.

License This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License (“License”). To view a copy of this license, visit http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This license forbids both commercial use and creation of derivative works. Now, download a copy of the community edition here. Unzip it and look at the "license.txt" file.

GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 19 November 2007

So, which is the mistake?

This first license is for the documentation only; the Sugar CE codebase is licensed under the AGPL.

Does it simply allow someone to post schematics, firmware sources, Gerber files and BOMs with the implied, "Please don't make a bunch of these and sell them as your own design," or is there more to it?

This license might work just as well for that: Creative Commons by attribution/non-commercial/share-alike (v3.0)

My money is already stolen if I record the sound of my own band on my own CD. I don't need another theft if I want to let someone hear my songs on the net. Off course, the stolen money should go to the rights holder, but as a rights holder to my own songs, I never saw even a cent from it. And my songs have been played in public and broadcasted.

I feel for you. I own an internet radio station and totally support what people release under the Creative Commons license. http://www.creativecommons.org/ I refuse to pay the PPS fees and have had many arguements even with my own music just like yourself so please do not worry about it too much. My advice when it comes around to copyright issues for your own music; is take a leaf out of my book. Mail the master copy or the CD of your work to yourself along with a letter to yourself by Royal Mail signed for Special Delivery £5.95. When it arrives never open it, keep the signed for ticket and just store it, if you ever up in court over trivial issues, you must present the envelope along with the signed for ticket for forensic evaluation and that it has never been opened and only the judge can open in in a legal capacity. Who wins the case? You do! Good Luck!

License This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License (“License”). To view a copy of this license, visit http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

This license forbids both commercial use and creation of derivative works. Now, download a copy of the community edition here. Unzip it and look at the "license.txt" file.

GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, 19 November 2007

So, which is the mistake?

It's not even "open core". From the website:

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License

No derivative works = not open source. This is more like Microsoft's "shared source". You can look but you can't touch.

It would be great if the schools responded by setting up a massive file sharing system loaded with public domain, Creative Commons, GPL, and other legal content. There could easily fill it with hundreds of gigs of free legal music. I think pushing free legal non-RIAA music would be an AWESOME way to comply with RIAA demands to combat downloads of their stuff.

Just a few links to get them started:
http://www.dance-industries.com/
http://ccmixter.org/view/media/remix
http://phlow-magazine.com/free-mp3-music-download
http://www.clearbits.net/torrents
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://www.archive.org/details/audio
http://newteevee.com/2007/03/03/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/
http://newteevee.com/2010/02/05/ten-more-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrents/

and another four or five hundred links:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Directories

-

If a warning light is blinking, just take the bulb out. No more warning light, problem solved.. yes?

Bad engineering solution. A truly elegant solution will partake of the properties of either duct tape or WD-40. The latter probably isn't appropriate here, but duct tape will solve your blinking warning light and would damn sure solve the iPhone problem.


Use of Duct tape to improve iPhone reception by D. Duct is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

If a warning light is blinking, just take the bulb out. No more warning light, problem solved.. yes?

Bad engineering solution. A truly elegant solution will partake of the properties of either duct tape or WD-40. The latter probably isn't appropriate here, but duct tape will solve your blinking warning light and would damn sure solve the iPhone problem.


Use of Duct tape to improve iPhone reception by D. Duct is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Support the EFF: http://www.eff.org/helpout
Support Creative Commons: https://support.creativecommons.org/

Although the focus is on arists of media and music, the implications to the software industry are staggering. Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid as a result of ASCAP and similar lobbying. All that work you and I have put into creating a free software ecosystem are for nought, because some some media execs want to get paid for performances by musicians who didn't sign with them.

I donated to Creative Commons, EFF, and FSF for the first time today. You might not care about the media aspects but our industry absolutely depends on copyleft licenses and creative freedom, so I encourage all of you to do the same.

I suspect that ASCAP is not going to ask congress to stop people giving away their work with no restrictions (hence allowjng other "artists" to make money from it), rather they will ask the lawmakers to remove copyright protection from works that people want to release under a Creative Commons or similar license.

In other words, it is an attack on the GPL and similar licenses.

Although the focus is on arists of media and music, the implications to the software industry are staggering. Imagine if GPL, CC, APL, and many other licenses were deemed to be invalid. All that work you and I have put into creating a free software ecosystem are for nought, because some some media execs want to get paid for performances by musicians who didn't sign with them.

I donated to Creative Commons, EFF, and FSF for the first time today. You might not care about the media aspects but our industry absolutely depends on copyleft licenses and creative freedom, so I encourage all of you to do the same.

Anon because I've already moderated several times in this story thread.

MIT OpenCourseWare (That's their silly capitalization, don't blame me.)

Wired story about Flat World Knowledge, a company that provides free online and cheap printed copies of college texts that sells study aids and practice quizzes to support the business. Online browsing is free, PDF is about $20, and printed books cost about $60 or less if the pricing I read about is still current.

Wikibooks has books of several levels.

Here's a list of open books for undergraduate mathematics as recommended by Robert Beezer at University of Puget Sound

US House Bill 4575 is an attempt to authorize government grants to publishers of open-source college texts, as widespread affordable education is seen as good thing for the country as a whole. There's also a Senate version.

There's a consortium for Open Educational Resources among community colleges. They have lists of many titles under many categories. There's still a lot of work to be done, but some of the books have been peer-reviewed and they clearly mark which ones those are.

LibrarianChick links to all sorts of books and all sorts of sites that links to all sorts of other books. Some of these are texts, but there's also reference, fiction, tutorials, and more. Several of the linked works are university-level. There are also links to non-books, like search engines, research results pages at places like Harvard, and open online encyclopedias other than Wikipedia.

Textbooks Free is a fairly ugly site with beautiful content: links to textbooks by subject, links to other open textbook projects, and even an Amazon affiliate link so when you buy what non-open books you want you can support open textbooks. They also have links to open course materials like audio and video lectures. Their links include material from MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of California at Irvine, Tufts, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Bookboon has ad-supported free textbooks. For those of you who won't get too distracted from studies by the ads, I think that's not a bad model. These are free but not open and you have to give them your email address to download the books.

Free Book Centre has links to lots of open and public domain texts. They are mostly CS, engineering, and mathematics but they have some medical books too. There are some books linked that are free-but-closed, and some of those are only free for non-commercial use or only in electronic format (sometimes only by browsing the book on the author's web site without even saving a local copy). Some of the links are currently broken, too. Overall, it's a pretty useful site if you're looking for CS/math/EE/medical materials. One additional note of caution: at least one "book" is just a detailed ToC for a book by someone else, some "books" are just sample chapters for closed books for sale, a few are lecture notes for specific courses collected but not necessarily edited into textbook form, and there are a handful that seem to be pirated copies of commercial books from the likes of O'Reilly. You have been warned.

Creative Commons has a tag for news items about open textbooks to help us k

So how about everyone everywhere assume everything is either copyrighted or patented or trademarked and just submit to "them" who ever "them" may be.

Your Linux distribution has a trademarked logo. The software is licensed. It just might include some patented technologies.

H.264 support in Ubuntu's OEM distribution, for example.

Most of the software in Ubuntu is covered under the GNU General Public License. This *is* a license agreement. Unlike most license agreements, however, it does not restrict your usage of the software, but it does restrict the terms under which you can re-distribute it.
Likewise, while most of the software is covered by the GPL, *all* the software on the system is covered by some kind of license agreement be it MIT, X, Artistic, Apache, BSD, GPL, LGPL, etc, etc.
You will find the license agreements for the various pieces of software installed on your system in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright. Ubuntu license agreement

The "Creative Commons" license is - by default - a license protected by the law of copyright:

CC's Unported licenses were created using standard terms from the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and other international treaties related to copyright and intellectual property. FFAQ

MicroCenter.com stocks all of 13 items in Linux software, including, somewhat improbably, Slackware Linux.

Linux Software

MicroCenter catalogs about 30,000 items in all.

In hardware, 2 low-spec Ubuntu Linux [Desktop] PCs.

That the - IP protected to the max - product owns the consumer market space couldn't be made plainer.

Lugaru's game engine was GPL'd but they're retaining the art assets, so I'm assuming the others will follow suit.

The blog post about open sourcing Lugaru differs in that interpretation of their actions:

The game assets are included in the snapshot, and can be redistributed for free, but cannot be resold without our permission.

That means the assets aren't (or shouldn't be) distributed under GPL (because GPL permits commercial distribution), but it sounds like something similar to a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, sharealike license.

The two industries start from different premises, so that's why software can be free whereas media cannot.

Your opinion is belied by the fact that there is plenty of free media out there.

If you want me to read it, make it readable.

1. NO legalese 2. One page maximum length

Putting a 30 page wall of text full of legalese and word games does NOT constitute a useful document. I'm paying for a product, not to play lawyer.

Durn tootin'.

Let's call it the "EULA syndrome" (I know other publishers use different acro's... just go with it for now) It's how a legal agreement for the basic use of software is more language and more legal definitions than what the average end-user is willing/able to read/understand. This stunt by the UK game house is just putting a highlight on the particular phenomenon.

I think PP (coward) makes an excellent point; legally, there could be a premise by which the average consumer states that the EULA is overly complex and wordy, thereby defying its own comprehension. If enough cases are won on this premise, it could become legal precedent and eventually undermine the effectiveness of all EULA language. It wouldn't be surprising if this eventually finds its way to the Supreme Court; should this ever come to light in the US.

Picture this: What if legalese was actually an obscure form of source code?

Legal definitions are a finite set of rules and instructions, right? Sound familiar? How about C++? How about Ruby? How about Java? There's a surprising parallel between legalese and programming languages; the only real difference is that legal definitions have a much broader scope than just making an app' to find your local coffee shop. Though it's a tall order, the creation of a comprehensive "legal programming lexicon" is conceivably plausible, isn't it?

Take a look at creative-commons licensing; it's a concise, iconified and finite system of rules. They have laid the groundwork for a revolution in their own way; a simplified expression of legal rights.

What if there was an Eclipse module for building legal boilerplate in the same manner as building an iPhone app? There's conditional branching (you can't do X, you can do Y, but only when Z is true, etc.) there's common variables, (licensor, licensee, third parties) there's even constants (legal precedent) and snippets (legal definitions common to specific markets).

Take that a step further: Once the boilerplate is made, it gets "compiled" or refined into talking-point bullets or iconography that outlines the basic facts about the contract. The most-probable and most-important definitions become the framework, populated with finer details that you can reveal by drilling down. If any-given EULA could be expressed in the same manner as a CC matrix, wouldn't it be much easier to comprehend the licensing at-a-glance?

Many will argue that this is a doomed prospect, since so many software companies are "evil" and therefore rely on the obfuscation of obtuse language for their profiteering ends. That may be so... but isn't it the point to at least try?

If you want me to read it, make it readable.

1. NO legalese 2. One page maximum length

Putting a 30 page wall of text full of legalese and word games does NOT constitute a useful document. I'm paying for a product, not to play lawyer.

Durn tootin'.

Let's call it the "EULA syndrome" (I know other publishers use different acro's... just go with it for now) It's how a legal agreement for the basic use of software is more language and more legal definitions than what the average end-user is willing/able to read/understand. This stunt by the UK game house is just putting a highlight on the particular phenomenon.

I think PP (coward) makes an excellent point; legally, there could be a premise by which the average consumer states that the EULA is overly complex and wordy, thereby defying its own comprehension. If enough cases are won on this premise, it could become legal precedent and eventually undermine the effectiveness of all EULA language. It wouldn't be surprising if this eventually finds its way to the Supreme Court; should this ever come to light in the US.

Picture this: What if legalese was actually an obscure form of source code?

Legal definitions are a finite set of rules and instructions, right? Sound familiar? How about C++? How about Ruby? How about Java? There's a surprising parallel between legalese and programming languages; the only real difference is that legal definitions have a much broader scope than just making an app' to find your local coffee shop. Though it's a tall order, the creation of a comprehensive "legal programming lexicon" is conceivably plausible, isn't it?

Take a look at creative-commons licensing; it's a concise, iconified and finite system of rules. They have laid the groundwork for a revolution in their own way; a simplified expression of legal rights.

What if there was an Eclipse module for building legal boilerplate in the same manner as building an iPhone app? There's conditional branching (you can't do X, you can do Y, but only when Z is true, etc.) there's common variables, (licensor, licensee, third parties) there's even constants (legal precedent) and snippets (legal definitions common to specific markets).

Take that a step further: Once the boilerplate is made, it gets "compiled" or refined into talking-point bullets or iconography that outlines the basic facts about the contract. The most-probable and most-important definitions become the framework, populated with finer details that you can reveal by drilling down. If any-given EULA could be expressed in the same manner as a CC matrix, wouldn't it be much easier to comprehend the licensing at-a-glance?

Many will argue that this is a doomed prospect, since so many software companies are "evil" and therefore rely on the obfuscation of obtuse language for their profiteering ends. That may be so... but isn't it the point to at least try?

We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.

To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.

Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:

• SourceForge
• CreativeCommons
• Linux Kernel Archives
• arXiv
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• NetBSD
• Oracle
• Sun
• Haiku
• Internet Archive
• and so on

And remember, there's more where that came from.

If I understand it right, Google is being sued for scanning copyrighted works - I don't completely understand the legality of this (I'm not from USA, nor do I know its legal system). Of course, it seems logical that if Google is giving away verbatim copies of the books they should have permission to do so. Maybe showing just - e.g. - 5 pages per user is allowed under some exception (fair use, etc.)?

But what I'm really afraid is if somebody just decides Google should pay a tax on every book they scan, no matter if they actually need that permission or not (sometimes, people give their works away for free, or copyright expires). Just like those taxes that are paid to play musics publicly, which are also sometimes incorrectly applied to public performances of CC music.

It's all about the license

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

Creative Commons Deed
This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.

You are free:
- to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
- to Remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:
- Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
- Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

With the understanding that:
- Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
-- your fair dealing or fair use rights;
-- the author's moral rights; and
-- rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
- Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

As it is, they fit all of these. They attribute the original writers in their books. They are fully legit.

If you make content under Creative Commons or other licenses that allow paid redistribution, you also agree for someone else making money out of it in a suitable way. That is the real freedom and the basis of Creative Commons ShareAlike license - everyone is free to use it as they please, as long as the original author is attributed. If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.

Thanks for these comments. I agree with your general tone -- that it's great when hackers help people *unlike* themselves.

With regard to HTTP vs. HTTPS, you write that HTTPS adds "extra overhead." That's true in two ways -- TCP round-trips and CPU load. For CPU load, our server really can afford it. It's disk I/O that hurts us. As for the round-trips and their effect on latency, if the client does pipelining and stays on the site for a little while, that mostly goes away. So I think the worst thing HTTPS can do is drive away users who can't handle the extra round-trips for the first few page loads. That's a possible problem.

I don't want OpenHatch users' web traffic to be snoopable by their ISP or people using the same coffee-shop wifi connection. By keeping HTTPS on, I'm making life easier for those who value privacy. It's not as if it's really harder to use a HTTPS connection than HTTP one, so it's no burden (except the round-trips) on those who don't care about privacy. I'm heartened by big developer-oriented websites like Launchpad and Ohloh using HTTPS by default.

As for text-mode email clients, well, I use what I love. (-: I don't spend all that much time taking care of the Alpine source; mostly I fix Debian-related bugs for Debian/Ubuntu users who want to use it.

You can see from https://openhatch.org/people/paulproteus/ that I've hacked on projects with more visibility than that, like http://search.creativecommons.org/.

I try to keep OpenHatch responsive to user feedback. So do check out the site and send us email, or file a bug, or chat with us on #openhatch on irc.freenode.net!

...using Creative Commons like they already are? Creative commons already states that on most of their licenses that you can't use whatever is licensed in a way that makes it seem like the copyright holder (in this case, the US government) endorse you or your derivative work (without permission, of course, like if Obama officially said that he approved of something). I mean, really, there's WAY more than only two choices, and Creative Commons just makes sense to use.

I think CC0 is more liberal than the ISC license. It's basically putting the work in the public domain, but without the legal ambiguities of what "public domain" means internationally.

Is there really? What is the difference, for sake of argument? Pirating is X while sharing mp3 files with strangers via bit torrent is Y. What are X and Y and how are they different?

One is an crime, the other is an activity.

Example: I publish all my photos online under a Creative Commons License (Attribution, Share-Alike, for what it's worth). If you take a copy of a photo and post it on your own site, saying, 'I got this photo from Imagicity, I'm perfectly cool with that. But if - and this happens often enough - you take the photo and you either pretend it's yours or you don't say where you got it, I send you a polite notice saying, 'You're not abiding by the license. Please do so.'

If you keep ignoring me, I'll force you to take it down using whatever legal and technical means are at my disposal. I like sharing my work, but it's not going to generate much work for me if people don't know took the photo in the first place.

So: Both activities consist of sharing someone else's files over the Internet. The second infringes my grant of copyright, the first does not. That's because the infraction consists, not of sharing the file, but of willfully ignoring the terms under which file sharing is allowed.

So-called Content Publishers like to conflate these two acts into one, because it allows them to create exactly the confusion that you're experiencing, which in turn allows them to lobby everyone and his dog, asking to make this behaviour illegal. That would make life much simpler for them, because it would allow them to continue doing business as they always have done.

Unfortunately, actual creators like me prefer to leverage the freely shareable nature of digital file formats in a different way. We encourage people to make the best possible use of technology in order to build recognition and popularity. This is turn creates a market for our work where none existed before.

And that's why I'm willing to spend 15 minutes of my time composing a thoughtful reply to your question, while the *AA and their international cohorts spend millions calling my business model THEFT and PIRACY, all in caps and punctuated by elevenses.

But I noticed that your sig dedicates all of your posts to the public domain and that you are a lawyer (or at least claim to be, and on Slashdot no less, which I figure has got to be good enough for most purposes).

As a lawyer, what do you think of Creative Common's CC0? Would you consider putting your posts into the public domain by that vehicle instead of your current sig?

And just so this comment doesn't get modded to hell (one of the first 5 circles, as I think this post up to this point counts as "self-indulgent"), I can understand how your individual comments on Slashdot touch on a wide variety of different subjects and do not necessarily coalesce cleanly into a larger book or collection. As such, the potential for you to make profit off of your comments is very low. For a novelist or poet, however, there often is a large potential for commercial profit. Aside from things like documentation or technical specifications, when (if ever) would you suggest that authors release their material into the public domain?

I was online with many BBS' with during dial-up modems days before they died because of the Internet. /. has a few old stories about this awesome documentary from years ago:

• A Documentary About Bulletin Board Systems
• The BBS Documentary: A One Year Report
• 7 hour BBS Documentary Nearly Ready
• BBS Documentary Now Shipping
• Hundreds of Hours of BBS Documentary Interviews

Google Video has all the parts online:
1: Baud introduces the story of the beginning of the BBS, including interviews with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who used a snowstorm as an inspiration to change the world.
2: Sysops and Users introduces the stories of the people who used BBSes, and lets them tell their own stories of living in this new world.
3: Make it Pay covers the BBS industry that rose in the 1980's and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
4: Fidonet covers the largest volunteer-run computer network in history, and the people who made it a joy and a political nightmare.
5: Artscene tells the rarely-heard history of the ANSI Art Scene that thrived in the BBS world, where art was currency and battles waged over nothing more than pure talent.
6: HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking) hears from some of the users of "underground" BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.
7: Compression tells the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s and how a fight that broke out over something as simple as data compression resulted in waylaid lives and lost opportunity.
8: No Carrier wishes a fond farewell to the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet.

There is a DVD version that can be ordered, or downloaded for free and legally (hurray for Creative Commons) with less contents.

The GPL allows you to modify the original work. The bible, however, clearly states that it is the word of God and should not be modified. It is therefore not GPL-compatible.

So is it cc-by-nd (non-derivative-works)?

The harder they push in this direction, the more people will realize there is another way

The GFDL and CC-BY are rather different licenses. The first is a copyleft license (requires adaptations to be distributed under the same license), the latter is a permissive license (do anything you want so long as you give credit, roughly).

If you don't want copyleft, CC-BY is your choice.

If you do want copyleft, it would make sense to choose between GFDL and CC-BY-SA, which you can think of as the copyleft version of CC-BY. Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia sites) migrated from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA as their primary content license in June, see http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/15411

Thanks for not considering a more restrictive license. :)

Intel is making a tidy profit, because their competition is low, and there are no new entrants into the x86 market because of copyright and patents

Competition is usually a good thing; anti-competitive actions are usually illegal

With no copyright system enforced by the goverment, I propose that we would see intel go out of business...

Copyright normally does not apply to physical objects (you're thinking of patents)

...because they would never recoup their billion dollar investment in there processor when others copy and sell it just above raw costs.

Companies do not "sell it just above raw costs." They sell items where marginal cost=marginal revenue (this is a simplification--competition with Intel would influence pricing, but not to the extent that economic profit becomes zero or negative)

I would say that a majority of copyrighted material would not be made [if not for copyright]

What about Creative Commons? What about William Shakespeare? Wikipedia? "All rights reserved; we will sue you into the ground" is not the only possibility.

If only we seize it.

Don't give me hyperbole about our culture being locked away. Don't give me bullshit about how many Linux ISOs you download over bittorrent.

What's being locked away isn't our culture. What's being locked away is a bought and sold-out culture that we deluded ourselves into believing was our own. Rather than create culture, we, like our parents before us, feed like pigs at the trough on the culture sold to us by corporate conglomerates, willfully, knowingly, and happily, with shit-eating grins.

We have, and always have had, the power to define culture ourselves, and to keep that culture free, but we haven't, because most of us are sellouts, and most of us don't have the will to pass up the slop in the trough.

I dare you to stop the hypocritical bullshit. I dare you to define your own culture:
http://creativecommons.org/

We talked about the California free textbook program And there is some followup

I do not think it means what you think it means. A "hacker" is not "just a programmer". You can be a hacker without programming. It's actually "anyone who takes things apart to learn how they work and then make them do something else."

Changing the [program, books, picure] IS the point of the open source license.

No, the point of open source is having the source. Changing the source is one aspect, but simply having free access to the source allows one to understand the "program" better (for computer source) or reformat it or use it in other media (not "changing") for open source texts.

A CC http://creativecommons.org/ license book will: Remove Power from small committees of BIG states in determining what is in a textbook: Cal. Texas, NY, etc.

I don't know where you get this idea from. The open source California books were vetted by the state committee, just like any paper book. State departments of education will still mandate which textbooks will be used, whether they are paper or electrons. If you mean that local teachers will "update" the official textbooks, well, they already can provide extra material for printed books, and I don't know that I want local teachers "updating" the textbooks anyway. In fact, having them "update" an e-textbook means they can make it say whatever they want and it will still have the official stamp of approval from the state or local school board.

Did you forget to attach the sarcasm tag?
To quote "The Princess Bride", "You keep using that word (hacker). I do not think it means what you think it means."

• The correct word is cracker. Hacker is just a programmer.
• Changing the [program, books, picure] IS the point of the open source license.
• A CC http://creativecommons.org/ license book will:
• • Save Time - Update a book - not rewrite it just so YOU have a copyright.
  • Save Money - Download and burn a CD or flash drive full of books - cheap
  • Save Environment: Less trees, Less Energy to Produce
  • Produce Regional/Localize versions as needed. - State History, City History, meet weird guidelines.
  • Remove Power from small committees of BIG states in determining what is in a textbook: Cal. Texas, NY, etc.

Creative Commons (home of Creative Commons License) has a web portal http://learn.creativecommons.org/ dedicated to "Open Source" textbooks, learning, etc.

They cannot survive if they're expected to field a network of professional reporters, produce quality news stories and then give it away free to some other site (like Wikinews).

It seams to be working ok for al jazeera who license thier live footage under CC-BY. I believe the whole point is that the news/footage/information should be given away because:
1)It gets you a reputation and so people are more likely to use the products you make money from
2)The info/news gets out anyway

Between commercial licensed content like al jazeera, national stations (BBC), first hand journalism and press releases, the news is going to be reported. Collating the news can be done by those producing it or it can be done by others such as wikinews.

You obviously have not been paying any attention at all. A certain politicians rise in popularity by the name of Ron Paul springs to mind as an indication of the reach of the internet. Numerous web sites get attention from many eyes which detail the failings of society, from abusive police officers, one quick you tube link pretty well buggers them up to media celebrities tell alls, tom cruise and the delusion of a rabid scientologist springs to mind. All of these used to be hidden and rarely achieved public viewing and when they finally did the were more often swamped by a disingenuous publics relations campaign, basically professional liars obscuring the the truth with fraudulent for profit lies. Those professional lies are time and time again now being undone by the internet and as it often turns out by people who read and post on slashdot.

Back to the original point of the article, 'that the copyright black hole is swallowing out culture', one really has to stop and think, should we let it, is the mass media, mass consumption, greed ahead of need, excellence in ignorance, worth preserving. Sure it has an interesting historical context but should it simply be starved of income and allowed to rot. Whilst the Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/, is itself based upon current copyright laws, shouldn't we simply allow it and the internet to rewrite our new collective expression of a shared culture, where parts of it are not held in a death grip of greed and held to ransom.

So a real drive to abandon 20th century manufactured for sale culture, the empty shallow facade of a marketing culture. We could always resurrect any worthwhile parts in 70 odd years time although it would hardly seem worthwhile considering the volume of content already created under creative commons and published on the internet, the mind simply boggles at the amount of additional content that would be created over the next 70 years. Now if you seriously think that creative commons content could never have the same professional polish as proprietary strictly controlled content, just stop to think how say an animated movie could be refined and worked on continuously for that period, animation, story line, 2d to 3d to virtual reality, it never dies, it is never locked up, it continues to grow and develop over the decades.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, so genuinely uniquely of real value, in the current culture that it could not be recreated or replaced. The truth is we as a society simply have become convinced by modern manipulative marketing techniques that somehow we will all die if we don't value and pay for all that mass media blather.

Lessig is a lawyer, and the legal difference between the public domain and something licensed under a Creative Commons Zero License is interesting to him. To most of the rest of us, as far as I can tell, it's really not.

Technically, by publishing your comments here, you retain full copyright just like everything else you've ever written under the Berne Convention by default. /. is even nicer, since in the SourceForge TOS Sec. 13 says that they'll help you if you get your stuff copied without permission and it ends up on one of their websites. A lot of TOS don't even have explicit compliance with the DMCA, love it or hate it (or both).

Your idea that the site should include some boilerplate that says all content is licensed under the GNU GPL or CC-BY-NC-ND would be exactly the opposite of what you want, I think. If they were to do that, they would be stripping the users from the right of total control of their works. Any license that automatically strips authors of their rights to determine how their work promulgates (I'm looking at you, GPL!) to me, at least, seems abusive.

And while IANAL, IAALS, and as such, this is not legal advice, I can't even be your lawyer if I wanted and all that fun stuff.

Weeellll, BINGO, clearly yes the whole site is taking the piss our of M$ and their endless 'get the facts' non facts FUD campaigns. So at the FSF you do have a bunch of people who work together, enjoy what their doing and their involvement with computer technology is driven by way more than just shallow corporate profits, eg. http://theangrypixel.com/blog/ and the site licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/.

Now these people are pretty bright and they are bound to have a pretty broad sense of humour and they know exactly how this campaign will affect the M$ marketing department, the M$ marketdroids will be frothing at the mouth and contacting all their advertising dollar puppets to bash the site and from the FSF foundations viewpoint, cheeky chaps and lasses that they, drive more of them to the site.

Now if your unhappy with M$ you will like the site and spread it and, if you are happy with M$ you most likely wont even bother to go there, of course if you are a M$ marketdriod you will be forced to go there suffer an apoplectic fit and immediately start scheming and plotting, inbetween curses and mad cackling, trying to find ways of gaining marketing revenge ;D.

I'm pretty sure he was implying to just release it as public domain.

Possibly. But that also requires more work than "here's the program. It's free -- enjoy", and likely doesn't help with liability. I'd tend to trust CC0, but that's way more hoops than slapping a Simplified BSD license on things.

I would definitely check out the different open textbook platforms out there, some of which were mentioned above, such as the CK-12 Foundation. One model you might look at is the open textbook "Collaborative Statistics" that is published on the Connexions website (http://cnx.org). I interviewed Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky last year, and they talk about what they went through in terms of publishing logistics and also the professional and academic results of publishing openly. See ccLearn's Inside OER interview: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/11112. Hope this helps!

So if there are special restrictions, and they want to retain copyright, then give it a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons BY and BY-SA are not the only licenses for Free textbooks. Nor are they even the only licenses for editable Free textbooks.

But definitely don't call it open source. Open source specifically applies to software.

The GNU General Public License defines "source code" as the form of a work designed for editing. The GNU Free Documentation License defines "transparent" in a similar way. So "open source", said of a work other than a computer program, means that the work is both Free and available in an editable form.

So if there are special restrictions, and they want to retain copyright, then give it a Creative Commons license. But definitely don't call it open source. Open source specifically applies to software.

The GPL equivalent for non-software IP is Creative Commons

Right - real FOSSers should release their source using the CC-GPL.

Am I the only that's starting to think that FOSS licenses are starting to resemble a form of ePeen? "Ha - my license is far more permissive than your license!"

The standard license on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA. It's my understanding (as a non-lawyer) that if you upload an image to Wikipedia also as ShareAlike, then anyone who uses your image is bound by the creative commons license (or a compatible alternative) for any derivative works (similar in spirit to the GPL).

Yes, but is a document that you embed the photo into a derivative work? Wikipedia itself has always assumed not. It's embedded, for instance, CC-BY-SA images in GFDL content, even though the licenses are incompatible. Thus you could embed a CC-BY-SA photo in a proprietary work just fine, as long as you make available any changes to the photo itself. CC-BY-SA is much weaker copyleft than the GPL, AFAICT: more like the LGPL.

But, as usual, IANAL.