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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.)"
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.
Would it *really* hurt Microsoft if the Windows 1.0 code went public? I can't see how -- it would probably cost more to duplicate the years upon years of incremental improvements than to reimplement ground-up; Likewise release of the original AT&T sources could in no way pose a threat to Sun's sales of Solaris.
In any event -- the point of copyright is not to prevent the public from getting "a big taste" of how things work, but to allow the author sufficient opportunity to make money as to encourage the work's initial production. Permitting the public access to the source of 14-year-old software does little to harm copyright owners and much to widen the variety of sources available to curious tinkerers.
Don't just think about subjects such as "how to use windows 3.1". There are books about CS theory which don't become outdated so quickly.
For example, I am not sure how old "the Art of Programming" is but I am sure that it will still be quite usefull in 14 more years.