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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.)"

7 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Software by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Think Id by absurdhero · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 This reminds me Id Software's similar strategy of Freeing their games after they get a bit out of date but are still useful.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 :)

  3. It's things like this by Eezy+Bordone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  4. It would be great... by Gortbusters.org · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:It would be great... by HBI · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I wonder how many older works are going to simply disappear due to fear of copyright infringement.

      I feel quite certain that many books from the 30's and 40's are probably gone forever. No one has translated them into online form, and the bindings are cracking and the books are going into the trash.

      I did some library cleaning in the early 80's and disposed of a treasure trove of books from this era under instructions from the military school I was getting an education from. The argument was "they are old and obsolete". Wish I could have saved them all.

      --
      HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
  5. When does the copyright on Open Source expire? by vadim_t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  6. Free book cost real money (for us) by eggboard · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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