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Apple's iBooks EULA Drawing Ire
An anonymous reader writes in with one of many articles about the iBooks EULA, this time questioning whether it is even enforceable. Quoting: "The iBooks Author EULA plainly tries to create an exclusive license for Apple to be the sole distributor of any worked created with it, but under the Copyright Act an exclusive license is a 'transfer of copyright ownership,' and under 17 U.S.C. 204 such a transfer 'is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.' When authors rebel and take their work elsewhere, Apple has, at most, a claim for breach-of-EULA — but their damages are the failure to pay $0 for the program."
Bic Pens Inc now claims exclusive distributorship rights for anything created with one of their writing implements.
Not to be outdone, Starbucks now claims exclusive distributorship rights for anything created while under the influence of their beverages.
PDF is free and open now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf
Relevant snippet:
"While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
Apple makes great products, and I was their customer for almost twenty years, but a few years ago I gave them up. I could no longer stand the bullshit and shenanigans which come with all their products. For me, the breaking point came when my next-gen iPod couldn't use the $1 cables I'd had with my previous-gen iPod, and now I was expected to buy Apple-branded chip-locked cables for $50. FIFTY DOLLARS!
No. No, no, no. Fuck you, no. I still own and like my MacBook Pro (from 2007), but it is starting to get a little long in the tooth, and in the next couple years I'll replace it with something other than a Mac. I replaced my iPod with an Android pod. I bought an Android tablet instead of an iPad. I'm a programmer who might write apps, but I don't even consider the iOS platform.
iBooks? Sounds great! The world desperately needs to shake up the textbook industry, and I'm happy that a large company is doing something about it. But no, I won't consider it. Since I gave up Apple, they have continued to release products which look great and reportedly work great, but no, I'm not willing to put up with the bullshit to use them, because that would make me feel like a chump.
I do have a sliver of hope that all the bullshit was due to Steve Jobs' personal hatred for his customers, and now that he is dead perhaps Apple will slowly shed that hatred. There are no signs of that yet, but I would expect it to take a while.
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
Nonsense. You only can't publish the very file created by iBooks Author elsewhere. The content you wrote is still yours.
This is even spelled out in the EULA later on. Of course this is desperately ignored in that article and everywhere else.
And since their format is a variation of epub, which is both an industry standard AND based upon HTML which is itself based upon plain text, I expect iBook->epub conversion tools to be available in a matter of days. I'd almost bet money that Calibre will be able to import, read, convert, and export iBooks within a couple of weeks.
So to get around Apple's EULA:
1. Create iBook with Apple's tool.
2. Convert to your favorite format.
3. Distribute.
4. There's no need for a "?" here.
5. Profit!
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
At least with normal publishers, if they don't take your book, you can shop it around.
Once you sign that new contract, Apple has full control over you capitalising on your efforts.
That doesn't offend you?
What offends me is people being so dumb that they can't understand the actual situation, which is this:
Most of the work involved in creating a book goes into the content -- text, pictures, research, etc etc etc. Some (not a trivial amount, it is real work) goes into formatting the content in an attractive manner for publication.
Apple's new app covers only the formatting part. It's basically a tool intended to make it easy to create nice looking, featureful e-book files in a format which is exclusive to Apple's platform.
If you use Apple's app to put your content into an iBook format file, Apple isn't claiming ownership of the content. Just that you can't publish the iBooks-formatted version any way except through them. You're perfectly free to use other tools to create an ebook from the same copyrighted source material -- text, pictures, everything -- in some other format, with no restrictions whatsoever. In fact, you could use ePub, which Apple's own viewing app supports, and supports very well, and you can distribute ePubs in literally any way you want, completely independent of Apple.
I don't pretend to know if what Apple's trying to do with this new iBooks format is based on sound legal theory. It doesn't seem like it fits with what I know about copyright law etc., but I am far from a lawyer. However, it's a damn sight short of Apple actually trying to own exclusive rights to book content, the way you're trying to spin it. They only want to own exclusive rights to publish files generated by their tool.
Lots of the outrage about this on the web seems to be about a desire for Apple to give away everything. That is, right now they're giving away a "free" high quality ebook formatting tool, where the real price of the software is that it makes Apple money in the end, either by getting a cut of the sales, or just promoting a format which only works on Apple's devices. People instead want Apple to give away a high quality ebook tool which generates generic, open format ebook files with no hooks.
Guess what, they're never going to do that. You could maybe convince them to generate open format files with no hooks, but I guarantee you the tool wouldn't have a price of $0 any more. They probably sunk a substantial amount of engineering budget into that app and the new book format it generates, and they're going to try to make a profit off it one way or another.
Exactly. This entire post is based on a false premise that you are giving away your rights to your content by using their authoring tool when in fact the only limitation is that you cannot take content created in iBooks Author and sell it elsewhere using the iBooks format. If you want to sell it outside of the app store, create it in a different format.
This article is a lot of nothing..
Calibre is free and does exactly what you specify; I can write something in plaintext, in notepad, and have Calibre convert it into various formats for me, automatically on a per-device basis; so for device A I might have it auto-export as .epub, and for device B as .pdf and so on and so forth.