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O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System

Posted by chrisd on from the creative-commons-good dept.

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.)"

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Open Books Project by heli0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...
  2. Visit Lessig's Blog.. by q2a · · Score: 5, Informative


    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!

  3. Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source, by gnat · · Score: 5, Informative
    Not true. Some simple esearch, would show that we take books in Word, Framemaker, rudimentary TeX, DocBook SGML and XML, HTML, WordPerfect, and Perl's POD format. Our production process ends up with books in XML or Framemaker, so we prefer input formats that can be readily converted into these formats.



    --Nat

    Editor at ORA