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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?
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.
"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
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
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.
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.