Oh yes, as a side-note, I should probably point out that Gutenberg more than likely did not consult with a good attorney before drafting their licensing agreement. Otherwise, the agreement would not relinquish certain rights to the works that Gutenberg themselves did not have anyway, or in other paragraphs impose a number of restrictions on the use of the works that Gutenberg themselves cannot legally impose. It may be that Gutenberg is simply trying to create a broad-reaching agreement that can be applicable in other countries. However, the lack of correspondence between the language in their pseudo-license and established U.S. copyright law is very conspicuous.
The "Wiki" nature of the site combined with the categorically stupid "free as in X, not free as in Y" rhetoric on their site leads me to believe that many non-lawyers were involved in the creation of the agreement and the site where it can be accessed. It is no wonder that people are so confused over copyright issues, when they detrimentally rely on bad information.
No, you're still misunderstanding me. The act of publishing a copy of a text -- the text, not the footnotes or annotations -- places that copy of the text under the copyright of the editor or publisher.
I appreciate your need to be understood, but the more you add to this discussion, the more you reveal the breadth of your misunderstanding of copyright law. For instance, copyrights are not held by publishers, but by authors. This is a well-settled tenet of copyright law. Read this if you're in disbelief. What's the problem here? It's that the original authors are long-since dead and the copyright has long since run out. Under those conditions, nobody has a copyright to the works--they are part of the public domain.
You may be confused here because the "editor" of a 400 year old work is not necessarily just chopping up and rearranging the original text, but is also making meaningful changes to it (mostly additions, i.e. is an author in his/her own right). As I said earlier, those additions are subject to copyright in the re-published works in which they appear. Again, this is well-settled law. Consult Section 103(b) of the Code for more information. Here's the text of it:
(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.
Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. You go on:
However, once you upload a public-domain work, Project Gutenberg's act of reproducing it places that copy of the text under a copyright owned by Project Gutenberg. It is only on the basis of this that they are able to attach that licence of theirs to the start of each text: you can't licence something you don't own. They don't have an explicit copyright notice in the text, but that's not legally necessary; they do include a general notice in the Project Gutenberg Licence:
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
Again, you're close but not at all accurate here. You sound like one of those people who has gotten their head all mixed up about licensing and copyright issues by reading the postings of Slashdot's myriad C++ programmers and 14 year-olds who themselves don't understand copyright laws. I hold those people 100% responsible for your confusion over compilation copyrights. ("You can't license something you can't own" and so on).
Gutenberg's act of reproducing a work on their site does not create a copyright to the individual work at all (again, consult the explicit language of the U.S. law on the subject in section 103(b) of the U.S. Code). They have no copyright notices on their works because they they would be breaking the law if they did--they don't and never have owned the rights to any of the works on their site.
Go pick up a compilation of any short stories in printed form where the stories are in the public domain. Do you see how there are no copyright notices at the beginning of each story? Do you see how they're all at the very front of the book? That's because the only thing that's copyrighted is the COLLECTION itself--the act of pulling the stories together into one cohesive book and creating something new in the process--not the stories themselves. You see, the only thing new that
Funny you should say that. Between the plant and the weather application, I was pretty nonplussed. They had that whole "It's been done" vibe. In fact, a very clever associate of mine already has a webcam aimed at the heavens, and has his PC set to display the image as his desktop background. There goes most of that program's functionality right there.
I voted for whistler, too, but the topmost poster on that whistler thread was right: so far there's a lot of hype and promise in the mockups, but no actual software just yet. I guess we'll see.
...automatically spits out a post to my vaingloriously entitled blog every time I do something Windows-related on my Apple computer. Oh snap! Oh no he dih-int!;-)
Then perhaps you haven't heard of my soon-to-be-released autobiography, entitled Memoirs of a Slashdot Bystander: The Search for +5 Funny. Basically, it's 237 pages of filler that detail my computer hardware and software configurations, followed by another 82 pages that give interested readers insights into what I was doing between the ages of one and four. I am conservatively estimating that I will sell between 35 and 65 million copies, with a Michael Bay film based on my life (working title is "Transformers: The Movie") to follow in '07.
Please stop linking to crappy blogs written by people who think they're important enough to even have "memoirs" and who think they're being oh-so-clever-and-ironic when they juxtapose the terms "memoirs" and "bystander" in their post titles.
Mars missions are still extremely expensive, and there's a lot of wisdom behind analyzing past mistakes to make sure they don't happen again in future missions.
You know how people sometimes use the metric of "If you stacked all the X in the world (graham crackers, AOL CD's, empty pantyhose containers) end to end, it would reach the moon and back!" My tentative plan is to find those items and to dedicate them to that exact purpose. Mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, here I come!
The only, ONLY thing holding AOL still together are people who are less internet savvy and those who cling to AOL email addresses for their lives (certain professionals, businesspeople, et al).
Another +5 mis-informative comment. If you think that after all the years it's been in business, AOL is still just an ISP, then you haven't been paying attention. Their other properties more than pay the light bill, so to speak. Just because you're not aware of them doesn't mean they don't exist.
If AOL has a problem, it's that they are TOO big. They have a finger in too many pies, and have strayed far from their roots. They have lost focus as a company, sure, but to intimate that they are hanging on a thin financial thread that will break if your granny stops using them as an ISP is absolutely ridiculous and dishonest.
I think you're just really confused about how this works. That was the point of my comment, is that the text of Shakespeare is NOT copyrighted, at all. What could be subject to copyright would be annotations or footnotes in that edition. In other words, anything that the editor brings to the table in excess of the words themselves. I don't know how familiar you are with ebooks, but with free works they're often just HTML or ASCII text files that do not contain those additions.
Books available on Project Gutenberg are certainly under copyright, or there'd be no reason to enforce the use of licences prepended to each book there.
This is just plain wrong. There is no U.S. copyright on Project Gutenberg ebooks. In fact, the Project specifically prohibits copyrighted material. This is from the first page of their website:
Inappropriate Content
* All advertising material * All copyrighted material * All illegal material * Your own book. Project Gutenberg is not the place to publish your unpublished work. If you want to offer us your already published book, see how to submit your own work. * Anything not connected with ebooks * Anything with no or little use to the ebook community
I heard that GPLv3 kills puppies. Just what I heard. Seriously, if you're the FSF and you have a stated agenda that you would like to promote, wouldn't it be in your interest to tailor your fast and furious new license to complement the efforts of developers working on the most significant, most widely-used existing projects? I don't mean to downplay Stallman's or FSF's historical importance, but the future of free software is not with those players. It is with Linux, and Firefox, and so on--the software projects that Stallman and a ton of other people helped make possible.
Adoption of free software by non-nerds does not happen because of a Stallman speech about the software industry's problems, or because of GPLv3. Rather, it's the result of something as unassuming as a web browser that is more resilient to viruses and spyware than IE, and that provides a better browsing experience. That's really all that people care about.
I am not personally a fan of Stallman's--I think he's made his share of missteps that have hindered the free software movement. But overall, the net good that he and FSF have accomplished has already outweighed the bad. We have seen the open source movement burgeon and grow well beyond the ability of any one entity to kill it, hinder it, or even significantly influence it.
Does that mean we should dismiss GPLv3 as moot? No. Even if GPLv3 is 10 or even 20 years away from widespread adoption, or is just dismissed altogether as "aspirational", at least it's still out there. Out there to be used or out there to be used as a model for public licensing agreements yet to be drafted. There is no downside.
Slashdot Mirror
Just kidding, you're right. I think we're all on Firefox overload at this point.
Hmm, so we're calling yesterday a "preview" are we? ;) We know where to go and we know how to download it. Lock and load, gentlemen.
If you're like me and you've already been running RC3, then you've got it already.
Oh yes, as a side-note, I should probably point out that Gutenberg more than likely did not consult with a good attorney before drafting their licensing agreement. Otherwise, the agreement would not relinquish certain rights to the works that Gutenberg themselves did not have anyway, or in other paragraphs impose a number of restrictions on the use of the works that Gutenberg themselves cannot legally impose. It may be that Gutenberg is simply trying to create a broad-reaching agreement that can be applicable in other countries. However, the lack of correspondence between the language in their pseudo-license and established U.S. copyright law is very conspicuous.
The "Wiki" nature of the site combined with the categorically stupid "free as in X, not free as in Y" rhetoric on their site leads me to believe that many non-lawyers were involved in the creation of the agreement and the site where it can be accessed. It is no wonder that people are so confused over copyright issues, when they detrimentally rely on bad information.
I appreciate your need to be understood, but the more you add to this discussion, the more you reveal the breadth of your misunderstanding of copyright law. For instance, copyrights are not held by publishers, but by authors. This is a well-settled tenet of copyright law. Read this if you're in disbelief. What's the problem here? It's that the original authors are long-since dead and the copyright has long since run out. Under those conditions, nobody has a copyright to the works--they are part of the public domain.
You may be confused here because the "editor" of a 400 year old work is not necessarily just chopping up and rearranging the original text, but is also making meaningful changes to it (mostly additions, i.e. is an author in his/her own right). As I said earlier, those additions are subject to copyright in the re-published works in which they appear. Again, this is well-settled law. Consult Section 103(b) of the Code for more information. Here's the text of it:
Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. You go on:
Again, you're close but not at all accurate here. You sound like one of those people who has gotten their head all mixed up about licensing and copyright issues by reading the postings of Slashdot's myriad C++ programmers and 14 year-olds who themselves don't understand copyright laws. I hold those people 100% responsible for your confusion over compilation copyrights. ("You can't license something you can't own" and so on).
Gutenberg's act of reproducing a work on their site does not create a copyright to the individual work at all (again, consult the explicit language of the U.S. law on the subject in section 103(b) of the U.S. Code). They have no copyright notices on their works because they they would be breaking the law if they did--they don't and never have owned the rights to any of the works on their site.
Go pick up a compilation of any short stories in printed form where the stories are in the public domain. Do you see how there are no copyright notices at the beginning of each story? Do you see how they're all at the very front of the book? That's because the only thing that's copyrighted is the COLLECTION itself--the act of pulling the stories together into one cohesive book and creating something new in the process--not the stories themselves. You see, the only thing new that
Hehe, that answers that. Thanks!
Woo woo fake trolls!
It's payback for Mozilla's actually trying to assert its trademark rights!
Are there any differences between the two? I'm already running the RC3 ebuild and I'd really like to avoid upgrading if possible.
Funny you should say that. Between the plant and the weather application, I was pretty nonplussed. They had that whole "It's been done" vibe. In fact, a very clever associate of mine already has a webcam aimed at the heavens, and has his PC set to display the image as his desktop background. There goes most of that program's functionality right there.
I voted for whistler, too, but the topmost poster on that whistler thread was right: so far there's a lot of hype and promise in the mockups, but no actual software just yet. I guess we'll see.
...automatically spits out a post to my vaingloriously entitled blog every time I do something Windows-related on my Apple computer. Oh snap! Oh no he dih-int! ;-)
Touche (which I think is French for "touch me there, OK now harder!"). Perhaps you've just added another part to a two-part question.
What do you make of all this pro-Firefox, anti-IE digital jihadism?
Why did IE7 take such a long time to release after IE6?
Then perhaps you haven't heard of my soon-to-be-released autobiography, entitled Memoirs of a Slashdot Bystander: The Search for +5 Funny. Basically, it's 237 pages of filler that detail my computer hardware and software configurations, followed by another 82 pages that give interested readers insights into what I was doing between the ages of one and four. I am conservatively estimating that I will sell between 35 and 65 million copies, with a Michael Bay film based on my life (working title is "Transformers: The Movie") to follow in '07.
If even the breakdown is that drawn out and boring, then what chance do we have of even making it through the article?
Please stop linking to crappy blogs written by people who think they're important enough to even have "memoirs" and who think they're being oh-so-clever-and-ironic when they juxtapose the terms "memoirs" and "bystander" in their post titles.
Yes.
Mars missions are still extremely expensive, and there's a lot of wisdom behind analyzing past mistakes to make sure they don't happen again in future missions.
That's just what they want us to think.
Haha, well we did arrange a little "accident" with his laptop a while back.
You know how people sometimes use the metric of "If you stacked all the X in the world (graham crackers, AOL CD's, empty pantyhose containers) end to end, it would reach the moon and back!" My tentative plan is to find those items and to dedicate them to that exact purpose. Mole of Twinkies stacked end to end, here I come!
Another +5 mis-informative comment. If you think that after all the years it's been in business, AOL is still just an ISP, then you haven't been paying attention. Their other properties more than pay the light bill, so to speak. Just because you're not aware of them doesn't mean they don't exist.
If AOL has a problem, it's that they are TOO big. They have a finger in too many pies, and have strayed far from their roots. They have lost focus as a company, sure, but to intimate that they are hanging on a thin financial thread that will break if your granny stops using them as an ISP is absolutely ridiculous and dishonest.
This is just plain wrong. There is no U.S. copyright on Project Gutenberg ebooks. In fact, the Project specifically prohibits copyrighted material. This is from the first page of their website:
Inappropriate Content
* All advertising material
* All copyrighted material
* All illegal material
* Your own book. Project Gutenberg is not the place to publish your unpublished work. If you want to offer us your already published book, see how to submit your own work.
* Anything not connected with ebooks
* Anything with no or little use to the ebook community
I heard that GPLv3 kills puppies. Just what I heard. Seriously, if you're the FSF and you have a stated agenda that you would like to promote, wouldn't it be in your interest to tailor your fast and furious new license to complement the efforts of developers working on the most significant, most widely-used existing projects? I don't mean to downplay Stallman's or FSF's historical importance, but the future of free software is not with those players. It is with Linux, and Firefox, and so on--the software projects that Stallman and a ton of other people helped make possible.
Adoption of free software by non-nerds does not happen because of a Stallman speech about the software industry's problems, or because of GPLv3. Rather, it's the result of something as unassuming as a web browser that is more resilient to viruses and spyware than IE, and that provides a better browsing experience. That's really all that people care about.
I am not personally a fan of Stallman's--I think he's made his share of missteps that have hindered the free software movement. But overall, the net good that he and FSF have accomplished has already outweighed the bad. We have seen the open source movement burgeon and grow well beyond the ability of any one entity to kill it, hinder it, or even significantly influence it.
Does that mean we should dismiss GPLv3 as moot? No. Even if GPLv3 is 10 or even 20 years away from widespread adoption, or is just dismissed altogether as "aspirational", at least it's still out there. Out there to be used or out there to be used as a model for public licensing agreements yet to be drafted. There is no downside.
I second that. I'm tired of buying Chilton books every time I want to work on a car. Open source the combustible engine now! ;)