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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.)"
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...
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!
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.
That one is Stopping Spam, but I also wrote Managing Mailing Lists, and am a co-author of Practical Unix and Internet Security, 3rd ed.
--Nat
Editor at ORA
Wish I could have saved them all.
You could have.
A proper OCR of a book destroys that book. Feel free to take your old, old books which are not in print, and cut & scan them in. Transfer them to a media that will last until their copyright expires, and when it does expire distribute them.
Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.
Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.
Unfortunately that's not true. The LoC discards those two copies if the book is published, they only keep unpublished registered work on the theory that once a book is published someone is likely to hold on.
I guess O'Reilly's using CC's thing, but that's not open to everyone.
I think you're misinformed. CC isn't a license. CC offers a variety of licenses. They machine-generate a license to give the author whatever license terms she wants.
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