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O'Reilly Commits to Short Copyright Durations

Posted by michael on from the money-mouth dept.

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.

8 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting but... by madman101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How long are computer books useful these days?

    1. Re:Interesting but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      K&R C still classic and good

    2. Re:Interesting but... by Arcturax · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Probably not that long, but that is part of the point. How useful is steamboat Mickey to Disney anymore other than to use as filler on an overpriced DVD?

      Also, sometimes good ideas come out of old books, ideas that were valid then and still valid today. I imagine "Unix in a nutshell" will be as useful twenty years from now as it is today.

      --

      --Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
    3. Re:Interesting but... by NanoGator · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "How useful is steamboat Mickey to Disney anymore other than to use as filler on an overpriced DVD?"

      That's part of the reason to keep copyrights short. Encourage more diverse growth. Why invent a new character when you have a monopoly on the one you've got?

      --
      "Derp de derp."
    4. Re:Interesting but... by SoftCoreHonesty · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wow. Are you way off base. Copyright is a government endorsed temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creative work. It is intended to be a short term incentive to artists to create and be rewarded for their work. Copyright law has nothing to do with the intrinsic or perceived value of a title. The worst novel is protected just as equally as the best.

      In your mind I assume that the works of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, etc. should all still be copyright protected because they still hold value? I am not sure how you can justify that one.

    5. Re:Interesting but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ideas are not property. Inventions are not property. Copyright laws weren't invented to protect 'property' (there are other laws for this, dealing with 'larceny') 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.

  2. That's the point by nuggz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Old Manuals are often very good by starseeker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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