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.

Comments

Good Oreilly

[oZZoZZ]

They write excellent books, sell them at an excellent price (relativly), have a massive website with tons of free information. Publish many of thier titles as cheap Ebooks, and now volunatily shorten their copyright length

I dunno about you guys, but all these things make me look at Oreilly books before any other.

Thanks again Oreilly!

Re:Can't wait till that copyright runs out

[hal200]

I wouldn't say it's laughable. Consider the alternative for a momment. Which is better? Having a copyright which expires in 14-28 years, or one which expires in life + 70+ years? (Say, approx. 100 years on average)

The fact of the matter is that for a company like O'Reilly, it probably doesn't make sense from a business perspective to hold onto the copyrights for that long. As you've so brilliantly pointed out, there is little call nowadays for Perl 3 books. That, my friend, is exactly the point!

In the tech industry, the significant majority of books published have a shelf life of a few years at most. After that, they're practically worthless. Once taken out of print, the chance of them ever being republished is almost nil.

Eventually, it gets to the point where it's no longer worth it to even defend those copyrights because the money you'd spend searching for violations and defending your copyright in court costs far more than you could expect to earn over the remainder of the term. (And I would be very surprised if Tim O'Reilly didn't have a report cross his desk which showed this to him in concrete numbers)

Now, this doesn't hold for all publishers. Outside the tech sector, some books pay off in the long run. The Lord of the Rings saga is a perfect example. In those cases, from a business perspective, it's worthwhile for a publisher to hold on to his copyrights as long as possible because you never know which book in your catalogue is going to be "The Next Big Thing", and pay off big time.

For Tim O'Reilly, the chance of these books paying off for his company after 28 years is pretty close to 0. Tim O'Reilly may have strong principles, but he's a businessman first and foremost. It's a bold move that costs him and his company almost nothing.

The way I see it is that this is a brilliant move for O'Reilly. They gain practically no value from holding their copyrights to the maximum term allowed by law. By releasing their works under a shorter term, and remaining profitable, they can serve as very powerful case study for those who argue against the endless parade of copyright term extensions.