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O'Reilly Commits to Short Copyright Durations
Sam King writes "I found the following link on the lisnews.com site: O'Reilly Adopts 1790 Copyright Durations. A small but encouraging step taken by a publisher." We should provide direct links to O'Reilly's announcement and the Founder's Copyright website.
How long are computer books useful these days?
If you think algorythms from 14 years ago are irrelevant you might want to relook at that linux code.
While many OS specific manual may be woefully obsolete in 14 years many of the underlying concepts are not and many of O'reilly's works that were put out now a decade ago still have valid and relevant information for todays information age.
That is the point, if they only have a shelf life of 5 years, why do we need 100 years of copyright protection?
This is a real company proving that shorter terms will have a very small, if any effect on them. And provide a case study that short terms are effective.
O'Reilly's gesture is a good and excellent thing of course, but most of their titles are computer books that will be obsolete in six months and useless in three years, so having it enter the public domain in 28 years isn't all that impressive :-)
That of course, is the whole point. Usually publishers just let a book hang in 'out-of-print but copyrighted' limbo. Maybe in 28 years you'd like to put a copy of "Perl in a nutshell" online, just to show people how much the state-of-the-art has advanced. Or even degraded.. Who are you to say that if a work is not economically valuable it is worthless in every other respect? Conventional publishers don't think so, that's why they hang on to the copyright no-matter-what, to the detriment of the public interest.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
"thirty-year-old computer science manuals aren't in particularly high demand"
Not always true. Well written computer science books can often be timeless, and occasionally software can last that long or longer. An example is Maxima (http://maxima.sf.net) which was largely written back in the late sixties and early seventies and is still active today. I'm involved with the documentation effort on that project, and we would dearly love to be able to include the older manuals written about the system. Recreating docs is not simple!
There are also other very good reasons for these books to survive even if their subject matter doesn't do so well - 1) If the manuals are collected in a huge central archive as their copyrights expire and they become free, then the poor sucker who has to deal with a rare and/or obscure legacy system will have a place to go 2) The design and usage priciples of the software will be documented. They may suck, but old program != bad ideas. In fact, quite the contrary. Look at TeX, or Emacs. Old programs, but masterpieces of their art.
Don't knock old manuals. Yes there are huge amounts of crap out there in the computer world, but don't casually throw away knowledge. Even of old computer systems. You never know when you might wish you still had it.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Most works under copyright are out of print, because the publisher can see no economic reason to keep it in print.
And copyright law becomes an issue of choice, in the same way that you still have the choice to close-source your software. You think copyright terms should be shorter? Vote with your work. You think it should be 130 years? You have that option.
Ideas are not property. Inventions are not property. Copyright laws weren't invented to protect 'property' (there are other laws for this, dealing with 'theft') but to allow creative sorts some measure of time to profit from their work before said work was turned over to the commons.
It was a fundamental assumption of the Founding Fathers that no man could own an idea or an invention, that all creative work was derivate of work that came before it, and therefore that it must eventually be given over to the public (in essence, nothing you do in this regard is ever truly original). One of the great Orwellian word-plays of the day is to take intellectual labor and turn it into intellectual 'property', equating it to physical property. Just look how many people buy into the nonsense, and actually argue in support of it!
Copyrights are not about protecting property but about protecting the motivation of people to create, by giving them a decent time to profit from creativity. There is no 'property' in these endeavors, nor has there ever been any property. The entire concept of property is utterly irrelevant when it comes to copyright, although there are plenty of brainwashed idiots who take what's spoon-fed to them and parrot it endlessly, letting others do their thinking for them.
The problem with long copyrights is relatively straight-forward: what you invent is by necessity based upon all relevant inventions, research, and science that's gone before you. Your invention would not have been possible if these things had not been available to you. Overly long copyrights make it possible to stifle or even bring creation to a screeching halt because they profit only those invested in the status quo. Why bother to invent thing x if Company ABC is going to sue you for it, or require an enormous licensing fee, because your invention stands upon the shoulders of what they've done? In essence, these copyright laws claim that Company ABC is perfectly justified in claiming ownership not only in what they invented, but also everything that's gone before their invention - and that future potential inventors aren't allowed to do the same.
Remember, we live in a society where copyright extends to 1-click shopping and naturally occurring phenomena, like genes. You don't even have to invent something derivate, you simply have to yell 'dibs!' fast enough to get a patent. And once you do, it's wholely within your power to put an end to any invention based upon whatever you've copyrighted, or to make the price of entry so high most folks won't bother.
According to the U.S. Constitution, the highest law in the land, there exists one and only one justifiable reason for copyright:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
Anything else is bullshit, and uncontitutional besides.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I disagree. I think there are a lot of people who enjoy politically oriented music of all genres and eras. You may not listen to anything other than '60's protest rock, but I don't think that's representative.
Just a few very political bands/artists of note: R.E.M., Annie DiFranco, Pearl Jam, System of a Down
Also, although I agree that copyrights should be shorter (but not non-existent), I'm not sure that I buy your reason for Disney and other corporations not wanting things to go into the public domain. In what way is anybody's ability to say what they want politically related to whether or not Disney owns the copyright on Steamboat Willy? I don't think Disney wants the copyright on any of their cartoons to expire because then they lose their monopoly on the Mickey Mouse name, not because of political motivations.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
The real value in this is that it helps to keep the commons populated. The commercial value of computing texts after 28 years is effectively nothing. But this makes tracking down older reference materials easier if someone is willing to make them available online. Sure, most technical books are long-forgotten after nearly three decades, but the first edition of Kernighan and Ritchie's The C Programming Language is 25 years old, and Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming goes back several years farther than that. I don't begrudge either the authors or the publishers of those books a penny. But they are still in print in later editions. Releasing other books into the public domain at a time when they aren't profittable to keep in print helps to ensure that they don't disappear entirely from neglect.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.