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O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System
alansz writes "The O'Reilly and Associates Open Books Project has been around for a while, and I've just received a letter from Tim about the next step" Read on if you are interested in the creative commons, and how O'Reilly authors are being asked to take part.
Alansz continues, "ORA authors are being encouraged to allow ORA to self-limit their copyright to the Founders' Copyright (14 years with one 14-year extension possible), and to allow ORA to distribute their out-of-print (or post-Founder's Copyright) books to the public using the Creative Commons Attribution license (you can freely copy and distribute the work and derivatives, as long as you attribute the work to the author and ORA). Author agreement is required in order for ORA to transfer rights to Creative Commons.
The letter included a handy FAQ about author options (allow assignment to Creative Commons, stick with the usual maximum copyright deal, or have three months to try to find another publisher when the book goes out-of-print and allow assignment to CC if you don't). The letter also notes that different editions of books count as different works, so your latest edition can still be selling commercially and earlier editions can be released as open books.
(For my out-of-print ORA book, I'm going to allow them to assign the rights to CC and make it freely available. It's great to see a publisher thinking about copyright this way, but it's no more than I'd expect from the good folks at ORA.)"
It's kind of surprising little encouragement is given to the release of software under these terms. I suspect most software companies would have no problem with copyright lasting a maximum of 30 or so years. Most software seems to reach the end of its shelflife within five years of release.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It is pretty cool that another well known company found a way to get something out of a copyleft licensing scheme. This reminds me Id Software's similar strategy of Freeing their games after they get a bit out of date but are still useful. O'Reilly is attempting to do the same thing with books. :)
One more reason why I like O'Reilly
What is your book?
Here is one of the more interesting entries in the Open Books Project: Free as in Freedom
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
That make me think not every company is a money leech. O'reilly has some awesome products and it's good to see them putting them out there for anyone (with a PC at least to start the cycle) to use.
-EB
Do you ever walk alone like a drifter in the dark?
To start seeing a lot of old books appear online. It would create an easy way to do research, i.e. have a virtual library.
How many times have you picked up a book for a research paper and it was dated from the 60s or 70s?
Even then, I doubt that many people will get the extension... so we're talking 80 and soon to be 90s.
--------
Free your mind.
From my point of view, the whole issue about copyrighting is questionable because people are applying same rules as they are for money.
Money is simplyfing things, of course, but the question is, if the thing which you trade for the money rather than for things you produce yourself, has the anymore same quality or will it become something different.
Trading just things is easy, object remains object even after trade, you can still preted that it is _really_ the same object.
Ideas are more flexible and their base value can change far more radically.
We ought to applaude O'Reilly for acknowledging the importance of honoring the original intent of copyright to promote innovation and the limited term of protection for intellectual property to benefit individuals. They are one of the few corporate citizens who have broken ranks to speak out against the attempts by industry to make copyrights more or less permanent. But we should also note that O'Reilly has a bit less self-interest in promoting extended copyright protections due to the nature of the majority of their publication: technical publications that have a limited shelf life.
I'm a bit ambivalent about this... on one hand, I like the idea of open flow of information, and think copyright periods could definitely be cut down. What the public gets out of the copyright "bargain" now is clearly less and less, and if you can't turn a good profit from a single edition of a book inside of 2-3 decades, another 4-6 decades isn't going to help (and if you can, profit in 2-3, don't just sit and coast on that).
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something. For another, the more substantial you make the time period you have copyright, the more you can recover risk/opportunity costs associated with a work -- or other works that didn't make it (indefinite or 75 years is waaay too long, but I don't think 30 is).
Tweet, tweet.
Its truly beautifull.
I can't count the number of times, I have gone to the bookstore, seen a topic of some interest, and then been completely destroyed by the price of the book. Can anyone really think that pricing textbooks at over a hundred dollars a copy is anything but an attempt to rip students off. Should it require a business case justification to learn something new.
Our whole society is becoming knowledge based, with skill and information as the new capital. If we want to continue to have a wealthy society we need to make access to knowledge easy for everyone. Dead tree models that price books to the skies will insure that we dont have a skilled or educated populace.
Visit the man who is at the front lines of this battle for us all.
"If this case has taught us anything, it is the importance of their battle."
Viva la Resistance!
Yup, it would be useless. 14 years ago, it would be 1989, so what technology did we have then? 386s just coming into birth? I was still using my 640K 8088 with 8 MHz turbo speed. I don't think MS Windows 3.1 was officially out until 1990.
It's a nice gesture, but effectively useless.
Does anyone actually have a license drawn up for this? I guess O'Reilly's using CC's thing, but that's not open to everyone.
This is what I've been wondering for a while. Say I write a program, and in X years it becomes public domain. But what happens with things like the Linux kernel? Will it ever become public domain, or copyright will last until people stop updating it for X years?
I can't count the number of times, I have gone to the bookstore, seen a topic of some interest, and then been completely destroyed by the price of the book.
Computer books, anyone? Especially those with CDs...
Interesting to see this story, because I just had a disaster in giving away the electronic edition of Real World Adobe GoLive 6. Peachpit Press published the book in March 2002, and we had the rights to release it electronically, for fee or free, and with the sales of the title low, we decided to give it away.
Unfortunately, I hosted the book on a server run by a friend at a Level 3 co-location, which charges by the 9th busiest hour. In 36 hours, we had 10,000 downloads of an average of 20 Mb each. Right. So we hit potentially a $15,000 bill for the ninth busiest hour being 16 Mbps (the first 1 Mbps was included in his monthly bill).
So I'm screwed here, of course, and trying to raise a dollar or two from folks who downloaded the book and found it useful. We don't know the final bill, and we don't know whether Level 3 will negotiate. This is more like a natural disaster than a business decision.
If I'd been smart, of course, I would have distributed the download to many sites with no bandwidth fees or limited numbers of simultaneous users. I just thought we'd get a few hundred downloads. Not 10,000.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
This is untrue. I just finished work on the 3rd edition of Practical Unix and Internet Security, which was written in Adobe FrameMaker, which is, as far as I know, one of their preferred formats.
I have written other books for ORA in groff and in MS word, and I bet they'd be able to handle several other formats.
And if that's true, it explains a lot. I can't tell you how many times I've had trouble with some kind of wacky typesetting in an O'Reilly book. Wouldn't using Tex or something avoid all of that?
Case in point: while I was still relatively new to Python, I picked up a book from them. Python sometimes prefixes variables with a double underscore, which, when run together in the typesetting, is difficult to distinguish from a single underscore.
</rant>quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
One thing about O'Reilly that I actually like is their adoption, but lack of fanaticism for Open Source.
Next time you visit their website to buy anything, when you hit the secure cart, take a good look at what they're using (in the URL, I tried to HEAD request them via https, but I wasn't having any luck). It's windows, folks. At least, if it's not windows, they've gone to a disturbing effort to use ASP in Linux (which, as a web application programmer, I see no need for with current solutions like PHP and JSP).
Have you done any inquiry on why this might be the case, regarding Word files? Perhaps their editors have special macros that they use, or something along those lines. What about templates, etc, etc. I really don't use word processors, so I'm not going to judge one way or another, but there is probably a reason, be it good or not, and I doubt it's because of some silly political stance.
I think we're just waiting for MS to fulfill it's mission statement- a computer on every desk. Once there's a computer on pretty much every desk, they'll close up shop. Mission accomplished.
What's that?
Oh.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something.
Keeping Disney's paws off your work can be done with "first mover" marketing, including official merchandising and licensing to a movie studio within a few years after publication. For example, J. K. Rowling is doing this with her Harry Potter series of novels about a young wizard in training. Such a "first mover" strategy doesn't need life plus 70 to be effective.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Disney, wanting new material, decides they like it too. They ask for film rights. I say, OK, but insist on preserving character of the book. They hum and haw, then decide they don't like me.
Then make sure not to sign away exclusive film rights before Disney demands the privilege to change the basic theme of the film. Tell Lord Farquaad's minion that if Disney doesn't want to preserve the spirit of your novel, you'll take it to Warner/New Line or Fox or Universal.
Will I retire or break 10K?
--Nat
Editor at ORA
No credit required.
Though the author of a work that's derivative of a pre-1923 work does not have to list the original work in advertising, he still has to list the original work on the U.S. copyright registration.
Will I retire or break 10K?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
What!? No TROFF?
Was nice to see UNIX Text Processing available as a download.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Both money and copyrights are non tangable. But when you copy money you are making a fradulent representation of your self, of your value, and what you earned. Yeah, I know the government, banks, and some dishonest businesses do that all the time - but it still doesn't make it right for us to do it.
Howerver, with copying it is a totally differnnt thing. I'd say 99.99% of people who copy music or whatever are not attempting to fradulently misrepresent themselves as the original creator, they just want to listen to, share, or distribute information at their disposal.
Unfortunately, inspite of all his positive contributions, Lessing adamantly refuses to accept that copying things is a basic moral right, and when you restrict that (yes even for only 14 years) you are violating someone. A violation that the information age will simply not accept even if it is for 10 minutes. Here it is important to understand that information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no room for middle ground - either you will half to attempt to controll all of it, or loose controll. The RIAA and MPAA understand that, and so should we.
The "Lessing" movement does not understand history. It reminds me of the people in the 1850's who desperately tried to make appeasements so that the free states could peacfully get along with the slave states. - just as the industrial revolution created forces that had to end slavery without appeasement, so does the information age half to get rid of copyright monopolies - all of them, no matter how radical and unappeasing that sounds. The real problem isn't a more sincere copyright, it is a failure to understand how evil copyrights really are.
As ORA specializes in technical publications, published material can become dated fast. When older material becomes freely available due to an expired copyright, ORA will be able to include that material royalty-free in the next generation of publications. No need to negotiate with the earlier authors, just pay someone to update the material.
>Imagine if O'Reilly books are free.
Imagine if older O'Reilly books are free.
But that was obvious if you didn't feel like being stupidly pedantic. The rest of my point was about letting *some* potential sales go for free in the interest of gaining market share and making consumers feel better about you as a brand.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Perhaps this is where we need to focus when worrying about copyright length. If businesses can make rational decisions on their own, we don't have to waste our time with the government. 1. Company's confident in their products voluntarily release them after a reasonable time 2. Customer's reward these company's with their business 3. profit
Now if this idea takes off, and is adopted even outside the realm of book publishing, the world will be a much better place.
I was surprised no one presented what actually happened to the LOTR and its copyright.
Some one in the publisher's employ forgot to renew the copyright after 14 years. Within a very short time, many publishers came out with editions of LOTR. My impression ws that Tolkien's estate did not do well as a consequence of the copyright loss. I'm not sure whether Tolkien was still alive at time of the outburst of copyright-free publication; does anyone know?
What I am sure of is that the three volumes of LOTR didn't take off until low cost copies were on the market.
but as an artist i would *love* to see disney/whoever to try to steal my music, claim it is theirs, and then just try to keep me from playing it. it wouldn't work because i can always recreate. if they are going to throw away my posessions, then they better look hard for all the backups. but sereiously, even though universal may still have a claim on all my work [mp3.com will not 'terminate' the contract!?? wtf is this]... if you have made something, and someone bigger than you has taken this something, and [either exploited others with it] or in any way cahnged the world using it on a really large scale YOU were the cause of this change and you were that whom made this impact
as artists we try over and over to make an impact on the world...right? i mean whether you are trying to portrait a message, trying to create something beautiful, just trying to play music/write, or whatever...the point is that the moment the big companies start to steal your work, or the moment anyone steals your work, is the moment you know that you are good at waht you do, so good that people are stealing your work. STEAL MY SONGS! say you wrote them! i'll be dead soon enough, and if you use them mabye you'll get laid/rich/healthy for the rest of your life! after all - my art will have made ONE PERSON'S LIFE arguably better, and if i could do that i'd die knowing that i made as much of a positive difference as fate would allow...
i'd hope everyone looks into this really hard to see what's wrong with this way of doing things...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It was much more complicated than that, and, yes, Tolkien was alive. At that time the US didn't recognize British copyrights, and you couldn't get a US copyright on a paperback book unless the US edition was published as soon as the other edition. So when the British paperback of LOTR was published, and a US one wasn't, ACE came out with their own paperback edition, which wasn't bound by copyrights to Tolkien. (Then Ballentine came out with an edition that was "Authorized" by the author.) etc.
It was probably even more complex than that, but it wasn't anything as simple as just not getting a copyright renewed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am an O'Reilly author, and have been for more than five years.
Actually, the problem is not that O'Reilly doesn't accept OpenOffice.org formatted documents as that the O'Reilly author template is not available for OOo. O'Reilly requires authors to format chapters using O'Reilly standard styles. For Word, O'Reilly supplies a template that includes macros, menus, and so on to make this formatting process very simple and quick. There is no such template available for OOo, which means authors have to embed the appropriate O'Reilly styles manually, which is much more time-consuming and error-prone than the automated tools available for Word.
The other problem with OOo isn't caused by O'Reilly, or at least not entirely. OOo munges some of the O'Reilly styles, and doesn't deal well with some embedded images. For example, I was revising one chapter document I'd created in Word for the current edition of a book. In that chapter, I'd used the "Sidebar" style. When I called up that document in OOo Writer, that entire section was invisible. Nothing I did in OOo would render it visible. Similarly, in one case an embedded image not only failed to display, but all text from the caption for that image down to the next section break disappeared entirely.
If O'Reilly created an OOo template, I might convert to OOo for creating new chapters. But until OOo fixes some of the problems with rendering Word 2000 documents, I can't really use OOo to revise existing chapters. It's a shame, really. I'd very much like to dispense with Word entirely and migrate to OOo under both Windows and Linux. But OOo isn't quite good enough yet for me to do that.
I've been keeping a drawing table pc-free so it can be used for art projects and correspondence/bills. I guess I always knew this whole evil Microsoft thing was really my fault.
Which old O'reilly books?
It'd be nice if the X Window eight volume set became free (though I have my set on the shelf, a searchable electronic copy for free would be nice), but most anything in the O'Reilly catalog that is relevant stays in print.
I am not breathlessly awaiting the free release of the O'reilly Mosaic for Macintosh books that I suspect are on the way.
My copy of the LOTR books, which date from about 1973, have a paragraph on the back cover about 'respecting living authors by buying only the authorized edition.' For years I didn't really know what that was all about.
I look back with nostalgia on that week I spent in the summer of 1975 laying in a hammock reading the trilogy....
Another possibility is to use a certain feature of Apache, which lets you throttle bandwidth
mod_bandwidth. I have used it succesfully to prevent automatic downloaders from taking over our webserver.
JP
Granted, sometimes a company wants everything and ends up merging with AOL as a result, but often they get monetary benefit instead.
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
Right, and those corporations that are satisfied without having *everything* are eventually purchased or run out of business by companies that do.
Not really. Even a company with a focus strictly on (say) palmtop embedded operating systems has more than enough work to keep it and its engineering and marketing teams busy for years; new companies (and large established ones) are entering even this niche market all the time, and the big companies just don't have enough of an advantage to kill off the small, tightly focused ones.
Wanting "everything" -- trying to go into embedded software for pump controllers, for instance -- is stupid for such a company, as it pulls staff and funding away from focus on their core competance, and puts them into competition with shops which are focused tightly on that area. (Yes, there are places that do embedded software for pump controllers -- one of my cousins is an embedded systems engineer at such a shop; their clients include companies building large-scale dishwashing equipment for university cafeterias).
Being blindly greedy is as bad an idea for a corporation as an individual -- and even the big boys need to be cautious. Consider a certain high-profile merger in recent history and its severe negative impact on the large tech company buying out one of its competitors. However much this is true for the big boys, however, it is far moreso for the myriad of smaller corporations which earn their keep by having a small, tight focus on a field in which they hold both respect and expertise.
...for writing the series of Foundation short stories, and presumably he was satisfied with the rate since he volunteered to do the work. After (and while) writing the series, he continued to work for higher and higher rate, as his talent was obvious.
I don't see how it has promoted the state of science and art that he unexpectedly many years later got paid a second time for work already done when the short stories were collected and printed as a series.
He was also paid a third time by doing later sequels (of qustionable quality) in the same series, which I presume sold wll based on the popularity of the original stories. That is more reasonable, as this was new payment for new work.
But damn I like your sig!
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
I'd strongly recommend against using that for anything but historical reference, the languag has changed a lot meanwhile.
However, it was the year C got standardized, so a C book from 1989 is still relevant (C99 isn't widely supported yet).
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what, ..."
exactly, make people laugh. That's why they were called "wise men." All the
other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the
wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my
wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How
about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How
about
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
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