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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?
What's next, your local grocery store offering to give away year-old fruit for free? Discounts on expired lottery tickets?
:-)
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
Now if we could get Tim to enter the recording industry...
G.
I can't remember O'Reilly ever fucking up in a big way (alas they had their share of heat) and their right to rake a decent profit (otherwise no more O'Reilly books and now that would be a shame) goes undisputed.
I like this move. I really do.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
But seriously, O'Reilly has done a lot more important stuff in copyright but this is laughable. He is not publishing Steamboat Willie or Moby Dick.
ooops, fifty other people have already commented on that. :(
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.
they're probably accurate for historical context, raw designs, conceptual stuff etc. It's good for their PR, and I'd compare it more to Abandonware software rather then books due to the limited useful life of the publications.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
How could it possibly be a dupe? The O'Reilly announcement dates one month later than the old Slashdot article you were pointing at. The fact that this new slashdot article first was posted one week after the announcement is another issue though.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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.
This would be more interesting if O'Reilly published CS books instead of software manuals. But even though this gift horse has no teeth, it's still rude (and pointless) to be looking in its mouth, so let's all shut up and smile.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If it was published before 1923 it is in the public domain. Otherwise here is a link to a table that has all the other cases. Until Congress extends it again
Free cell phone tracking
"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
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!
Most works under copyright are out of print, because the publisher can see no economic reason to keep it in print.
O'Reilly is nothing more than Animal porn. They just LOOK like computer books. I should know I saw one at a bookstore and it had an animal on the cover.
Sick-o's
I never could figure out why IP laws regarding time were extended in light of advances happening at an ever increasing rate.
...... forever....
In other words: now that technology is useful for a shorter and shorter time, it's important to make the inventors and artist of such technology able to have control rights over it for even longer periods of time.
For at such a rate the day will come when you invent of create something on the spot and spure of them moment to solve a one time problem and then own rights to it even after you have been dead
The day when we can no longer breath cause someone already did.
Do I understand correctly that all of O'Reilly's titles will be in the Public Domain in 28 years or less?
Then why have I been buying them, when I can wait?
An even better idea is the Baen Free Library
It makes much more sense to put older works out there for everyone at no charge in order to generate interest in newer works. And it's been working just like that for Baen. I know that I've bought quite a few books from various Baen authors after reading some of their work through the Free Library.
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Only 16 more years until my copy of O'Reilly's Programming with Curses goes public domain!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I have a idea that just jumped into my head while reading this thread.
Why not make copyrights variable? The author could choose to accept the free default (short) copyright, or pay to register for a longer one. And the extra premium you pay for additional years gets more expensive the longer you want it.
Ok, in order to clarify what I mean, how's this for an example.
20 years copyright: Free, no registration required.
30 years: $10,000 registration fee
40 years: $25,000 registration fee
50 years: $100,000 registration fee
75 years: $1,000,000 registration fee
That way, if you're a big company like Disney and you have something you think will be big, you can pay more to lock it up longer. But if you're willing to let your stuff go into the public domain sooner you don't pay anything.
Maybe you would allow a copyright holder to change their mind and extend the copyrights later. If you didn't regiser to extend it and your product was a big hit, maybe you could sign up for the longer protection at a later time. Although I think that should be even more expensive than buying the longer copyright protection up front since you could wait till you see how successful your product is before registering (less risk = more cost).
Even better would be a way to make the copyright charge based on the "value" of the property. Like you'd pay more for a long copyright on Star Wars than you would for a long copyright on Battlestar Galactica. I have no idea how that would work, but it would obviously be a better system than a fixed rate since people who make less from their item don't pay as much to register it.
I don't know if even *I* like this idea, but it seemed to me that it might be worth throwing out there. Thoughts?
My motto is: Never give up - unless it's harder than you want it to be.
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.
This is just what I'd expect from a publisher who espouses the value of choice, including the choice to not share. This could be good.
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
One would imagine so. Otherwise mere commerce power trademark law would consume a constitutional limit on copyrights.
But I haven't seen it come up much. There's the Comedy III Productions thing; the Amos 'n Andy case is vaguely related.
However, there is a very important caveat. Consider Mickey Mouse: the original Mickey Mouse from the 1928 shorts (Steamboat Willy, The Galloping Gaucho, and Plane Crazy) looks and acts and talks differently than the 'modern' Mickey.
If the copyright on the original Mickey expired, you could create new works that were derivative of that. But they could NOT be derivative of later works that were still copyrighted. So the later changes to the character (e.g. facial structure) couldn't be used by you, though you could change your own Mickey in new ways.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Authors retain the copyright to most books published in the United States; they simply license reproduction and distribution rights to a publisher. Terms vary, but typically the rights revert to the author when the book goes out-of-print. So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
But now I see a strange pattern as I investigate the books on my nearest shelf. Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books. Has O'Reily been forcing its authors to assign all copyrights?
Moby Dick is available at Project Gutenberg. Herman Melville died in 1891; it was release in 1991.
As far as 28 years for computer texts go, if you're talking about something like Using Java 1.2, then yes most of the information within it would be dated. However, if you're talking about books along the line of 'Solving Real World Problems with Logical Representations', then the concepts would still be useful, even if the examples require modernization. (And there's no such exact book that I know of, though there are probably similar ones that approximate it.)
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
The character might be copyrighted
But then again, it might not thanks to a faulty copyright notice.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this. Versions of the Linux kernel from 1990 would be available under public domain terms in a year, and versions of emacs and gcc would already be available. It'd be interesting if all the anti-copyleft people who call the GPL "viral" would be sufficiently anti-GPL enough to fork a 14 year old version.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Yeah... I agree... that is precisely why I want short copyrights.
Humor aside, it's the political speech that scares the crap out of corporations. Disney *knows* that people are going to pound them the minute their stuff gets into public domain.
For music, however, they have no excuse. Some really terrific stuff can come out of public domain music. The political stuff will be irrelevant in this area, I believe. If people aren't buying music, they are searching for popular music for free. Few people, if anybody, search for political music. The '60s protest rock is the extent of my political noise.
Laws are for people with no friends.
For another data point, you might find it interesting to check out the changed rules at Nature magazine. For some reason, /. wouldn't accept the usual html tag, so here's the URL:
x ml /05_news.xml&style=xml/05_news.xsl
http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=
In February, they basically dropped the old rule that you had to sign your paper over to them to get it published. Now their rule is that copyright must stay with the original author(s). To get it published, you assign to Nature a license that leaves you with ownership and the right to do essentially everything except give up ownership of your paper. You can use it freely in classroom material, make reprints, and put it up on web sites, as long as you maintain control. You can't hand it over to an employer, no matter what their rules may say.
If your employer already has a legal claim to your paper, Nature won't publish it. To get it published, your employer must first give you full rights.
And they are assigning ownership of all previously-published papers back to the authors under the same terms.
Their intent is to guarantee that any research that they publish can be made available to the public by the author(s), and that employers can't take any publication rights away from an author.
It'll be interesting to see what other tech publishers do.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
The problem with many old, but still copyrighted works, is that it is impossible to track down who if anyone holds the copyright. For example, who has the copyright on old Apple II games. If there were a $1.00 fee every ten years at least we would know who to go to in order to license the work.
Free cell phone tracking
/. is always saying we don't need more legislation on copyrights (more extensions and such), but to work things out economically.
So here's an opportunity to send publishers a message.
Everytime you buy an O'Reily book, circle the purchase on the receipt and send it to their offices, with a short note saying something like:
"I chose this book not only because I think it will be a high-quality resource but also because of your commitment to allowing innovation by limiting the term in which you hold exclusive copyrights to it. Thank you for your intelligent stance on IP." Send a copy to one of their competitors as well, saying that you didn't buy -their- book for the same reason.
If a publisher/producer/company of any sort gets enough of this type of feedback, other companies will take notice. And that's when they start limiting themselves, and not paying congress to buy more copyright extensions.
Trolling-putting a rubber c0ck down your pants and cutting it off with a chainsaw: noisy and it makes you look d1ckless
The founders copyright predates the 1841 case Folsom v Marsh which attempted to delineate fair use. So, do 1790 definitions of infringement apply to these books?
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.
How about we all plant a tree in his memory to thank him for this idea
jay
Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!
If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.
My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright
The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keeping in print, or the rights owner has died and no one knows who has the power to grant permission, or a thousand different reasons, all of which keep the work "frozen", even if someone wants to do something with it as a labor of love, or perhaps in a niche market that doesn't interest the rights holder.
Keep in mind that, for the vast majority of works, the slope of the sales curve is initially very steep; 80% of a typical paperback title's copies are sold in the first 3 months (source). Or consider music; for the last few years there have been about 25,000 to 35,000 new titles released each year, of these about 7,000 are released on major labels, and of those only about 10% are profitable (source). We can safely assume that the unprofitable titles go out of print. A small percentage are re-issued by indie labels, but again, the majority of titles end up in the vault, waiting for copyright to expire, useful to no one.