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.)"

Comments

Re:Software

[KDan]

Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft has made enough money from Windows? I can't believe you can uphold such horrible beliefs!

Understand this: No corporation has ever made enough money out of something. The only way that would happen would be if that corporation was the only corporation in the whole world, and made ALL the money. Then things would be right, and the world would be a happy place.

Daniel

I think we're just waiting

[abe ferlman]

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.

Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source,

[calidoscope]

we take books in Word, Framemaker, rudimentary TeX, DocBook SGML and XML, HTML, WordPerfect, and Perl's POD format.

What!? No TROFF?

Was nice to see UNIX Text Processing available as a download.

Re:It's things like this

[NoCoward]

"Imagine if O'Reilly books are free. More people get them. O'Reilly's mindshare in the market increases,"

Exactly! Even though they lose money on each unit, they will make it up in volume!

Re:Wow

[Government Drone]

This is almost exactly what I was wishing for [slashdot.org] a while ago.

Now if this idea takes off, and is adopted even outside the realm of book publishing, the world will be a much better place.

Hey! Prior art! Business Process!! You could patent this! And then charge people royalties for going into public domain! And....

Why is everyone looking at me like that?