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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.)"
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.
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 This reminds me Id Software's similar strategy of Freeing their games after they get a bit out of date but are still useful.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
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...
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?
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.
From my point of view, the whole issue about copyrighting is questionable because people are applying same rules as they are for money.
Money is simplyfing things, of course, but the question is, if the thing which you trade for the money rather than for things you produce yourself, has the anymore same quality or will it become something different.
Trading just things is easy, object remains object even after trade, you can still preted that it is _really_ the same object.
Ideas are more flexible and their base value can change far more radically.
We ought to applaude O'Reilly for acknowledging the importance of honoring the original intent of copyright to promote innovation and the limited term of protection for intellectual property to benefit individuals. They are one of the few corporate citizens who have broken ranks to speak out against the attempts by industry to make copyrights more or less permanent. But we should also note that O'Reilly has a bit less self-interest in promoting extended copyright protections due to the nature of the majority of their publication: technical publications that have a limited shelf life.
I'm a bit ambivalent about this... on one hand, I like the idea of open flow of information, and think copyright periods could definitely be cut down. What the public gets out of the copyright "bargain" now is clearly less and less, and if you can't turn a good profit from a single edition of a book inside of 2-3 decades, another 4-6 decades isn't going to help (and if you can, profit in 2-3, don't just sit and coast on that).
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something. For another, the more substantial you make the time period you have copyright, the more you can recover risk/opportunity costs associated with a work -- or other works that didn't make it (indefinite or 75 years is waaay too long, but I don't think 30 is).
Tweet, tweet.
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.
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!
Yup, it would be useless. 14 years ago, it would be 1989, so what technology did we have then? 386s just coming into birth? I was still using my 640K 8088 with 8 MHz turbo speed. I don't think MS Windows 3.1 was officially out until 1990.
It's a nice gesture, but effectively useless.
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?
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.
Computer books, anyone? Especially those with CDs...
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
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.
And if that's true, it explains a lot. I can't tell you how many times I've had trouble with some kind of wacky typesetting in an O'Reilly book. Wouldn't using Tex or something avoid all of that?
Case in point: while I was still relatively new to Python, I picked up a book from them. Python sometimes prefixes variables with a double underscore, which, when run together in the typesetting, is difficult to distinguish from a single underscore.
</rant>quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
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.
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.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something.
Keeping Disney's paws off your work can be done with "first mover" marketing, including official merchandising and licensing to a movie studio within a few years after publication. For example, J. K. Rowling is doing this with her Harry Potter series of novels about a young wizard in training. Such a "first mover" strategy doesn't need life plus 70 to be effective.
Will I retire or break 10K?
--Nat
Editor at ORA
No credit required.
Though the author of a work that's derivative of a pre-1923 work does not have to list the original work in advertising, he still has to list the original work on the U.S. copyright registration.
Will I retire or break 10K?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
What!? No TROFF?
Was nice to see UNIX Text Processing available as a download.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Both money and copyrights are non tangable. But when you copy money you are making a fradulent representation of your self, of your value, and what you earned. Yeah, I know the government, banks, and some dishonest businesses do that all the time - but it still doesn't make it right for us to do it.
Howerver, with copying it is a totally differnnt thing. I'd say 99.99% of people who copy music or whatever are not attempting to fradulently misrepresent themselves as the original creator, they just want to listen to, share, or distribute information at their disposal.
Unfortunately, inspite of all his positive contributions, Lessing adamantly refuses to accept that copying things is a basic moral right, and when you restrict that (yes even for only 14 years) you are violating someone. A violation that the information age will simply not accept even if it is for 10 minutes. Here it is important to understand that information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no room for middle ground - either you will half to attempt to controll all of it, or loose controll. The RIAA and MPAA understand that, and so should we.
The "Lessing" movement does not understand history. It reminds me of the people in the 1850's who desperately tried to make appeasements so that the free states could peacfully get along with the slave states. - just as the industrial revolution created forces that had to end slavery without appeasement, so does the information age half to get rid of copyright monopolies - all of them, no matter how radical and unappeasing that sounds. The real problem isn't a more sincere copyright, it is a failure to understand how evil copyrights really are.
I don't get it. Information wants to be free! Why not make ALL of your books freely available for download? What is the difference between a book and software?
We take inspiration from other folks interested in promoting the sharing of creative works. Foremost among these is Richard Stallman, founder of The Free Software Foundation and author of the General Public License, or the GNU GPL. We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.
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.
Find free books.
As ORA specializes in technical publications, published material can become dated fast. When older material becomes freely available due to an expired copyright, ORA will be able to include that material royalty-free in the next generation of publications. No need to negotiate with the earlier authors, just pay someone to update the material.
>Imagine if O'Reilly books are free.
Imagine if older O'Reilly books are free.
But that was obvious if you didn't feel like being stupidly pedantic. The rest of my point was about letting *some* potential sales go for free in the interest of gaining market share and making consumers feel better about you as a brand.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I was surprised no one presented what actually happened to the LOTR and its copyright.
Some one in the publisher's employ forgot to renew the copyright after 14 years. Within a very short time, many publishers came out with editions of LOTR. My impression ws that Tolkien's estate did not do well as a consequence of the copyright loss. I'm not sure whether Tolkien was still alive at time of the outburst of copyright-free publication; does anyone know?
What I am sure of is that the three volumes of LOTR didn't take off until low cost copies were on the market.
I am an O'Reilly author, and have been for more than five years.
Actually, the problem is not that O'Reilly doesn't accept OpenOffice.org formatted documents as that the O'Reilly author template is not available for OOo. O'Reilly requires authors to format chapters using O'Reilly standard styles. For Word, O'Reilly supplies a template that includes macros, menus, and so on to make this formatting process very simple and quick. There is no such template available for OOo, which means authors have to embed the appropriate O'Reilly styles manually, which is much more time-consuming and error-prone than the automated tools available for Word.
The other problem with OOo isn't caused by O'Reilly, or at least not entirely. OOo munges some of the O'Reilly styles, and doesn't deal well with some embedded images. For example, I was revising one chapter document I'd created in Word for the current edition of a book. In that chapter, I'd used the "Sidebar" style. When I called up that document in OOo Writer, that entire section was invisible. Nothing I did in OOo would render it visible. Similarly, in one case an embedded image not only failed to display, but all text from the caption for that image down to the next section break disappeared entirely.
If O'Reilly created an OOo template, I might convert to OOo for creating new chapters. But until OOo fixes some of the problems with rendering Word 2000 documents, I can't really use OOo to revise existing chapters. It's a shame, really. I'd very much like to dispense with Word entirely and migrate to OOo under both Windows and Linux. But OOo isn't quite good enough yet for me to do that.
Another possibility is to use a certain feature of Apache, which lets you throttle bandwidth
mod_bandwidth. I have used it succesfully to prevent automatic downloaders from taking over our webserver.
JP
Why is everyone looking at me like that?