O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System

alansz writes "The O'Reilly and Associates Open Books Project has been around for a while, and I've just received a letter from Tim about the next step" Read on if you are interested in the creative commons, and how O'Reilly authors are being asked to take part.

Alansz continues, "ORA authors are being encouraged to allow ORA to self-limit their copyright to the Founders' Copyright (14 years with one 14-year extension possible), and to allow ORA to distribute their out-of-print (or post-Founder's Copyright) books to the public using the Creative Commons Attribution license (you can freely copy and distribute the work and derivatives, as long as you attribute the work to the author and ORA). Author agreement is required in order for ORA to transfer rights to Creative Commons.

The letter included a handy FAQ about author options (allow assignment to Creative Commons, stick with the usual maximum copyright deal, or have three months to try to find another publisher when the book goes out-of-print and allow assignment to CC if you don't). The letter also notes that different editions of books count as different works, so your latest edition can still be selling commercially and earlier editions can be released as open books.

(For my out-of-print ORA book, I'm going to allow them to assign the rights to CC and make it freely available. It's great to see a publisher thinking about copyright this way, but it's no more than I'd expect from the good folks at ORA.)"

Open Books Project

[heli0]

Here is one of the more interesting entries in the Open Books Project: Free as in Freedom [oreilly.com]

Visit Lessig's Blog..

[q2a]

Visit the man [stanford.edu] who is at the front lines of this battle for us all.
"If this case has taught us anything, it is the importance of their battle."

Viva la Resistance!

Re:Ambivalence

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, they still have to credit the author of a public domain work, even if they don't have to pay you anything.

Nope. If it's public domain, then you can do anything you want with it, in any way you want. No credit required. (Though they might credit it anyway so as not to look bad.)

Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source,

[alansz]

This is untrue. I just finished work on the 3rd edition of Practical Unix and Internet Security, which was written in Adobe FrameMaker, which is, as far as I know, one of their preferred formats.

I have written other books for ORA in groff and in MS word, and I bet they'd be able to handle several other formats.

Re:What is your book?

[alansz]

That one is Stopping Spam, but I also wrote Managing Mailing Lists, and am a co-author of Practical Unix and Internet Security, 3rd ed.

Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source,

[gnat]

Not true. Some simple esearch [oreilly.com], would show that we take books in Word, Framemaker, rudimentary TeX, DocBook SGML and XML, HTML, WordPerfect, and Perl's POD format. Our production process ends up with books in XML or Framemaker, so we prefer input formats that can be readily converted into these formats.

--Nat

Editor at ORA

Re:It would be great...

[Planesdragon]

Wish I could have saved them all.

You could have.

A proper OCR of a book destroys that book. Feel free to take your old, old books which are not in print, and cut & scan them in. Transfer them to a media that will last until their copyright expires, and when it does expire distribute them.

Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.

Re:It would be great...

[zenyu]

Of course, in order to "register" a copyright (which gets you better legal protection, and used to be mandatory for any protection at all) you need to send a copy to the LIbrary of Congress--so those old books from the 30s and 40s are, theoretically, stored at the LoC.

Unfortunately that's not true. The LoC discards those two copies if the book is published, they only keep unpublished registered work on the theory that once a book is published someone is likely to hold on.

Re:License?

[bcrowell]

The GFDL and OPL are the two main, standard licenses. You can find out about them by Google searching.

I guess O'Reilly's using CC's thing, but that's not open to everyone.
I think you're misinformed. CC isn't a license. CC offers a variety of licenses. They machine-generate a license to give the author whatever license terms she wants.

Re:When does the copyright on Open Source expire?

[bcrowell]

The parent post is correct. Also, copyrights essentially don't expire any more. The last copyrights to expire in the U.S. were from 1922. All copyrights from 1923 and on will probably exist forever, since Congress shows every intention of making copyright into a permanent entitlement. Every time the 1923 batch comes up for expiration, they just extend the term again.

Re:Free book cost real money (for us)

[bcrowell]

I feel your pain. I just had to upgrade the webhosting for my own free books [lightandmatter.com], and it's not cheap. However, I sell printed copies, so for me it's just an advertising expense.

Another possibility is to use a certain feature of Apache, which lets you throttle bandwidth. For example, you can set up Apache so that any file greater than 3 Mb in size is only served up at a bandwidth like that of a modem. This might discourage some looky-lous who have fast connections and would otherwise just download the book, say "wow, it really is free," and then put it in the recycle bin.

Re:It's things like this (correction for idiots)

[SirSlud]

>Imagine if O'Reilly books are free.

Imagine if older O'Reilly books are free.

But that was obvious if you didn't feel like being stupidly pedantic. The rest of my point was about letting *some* potential sales go for free in the interest of gaining market share and making consumers feel better about you as a brand.

Re:Good for ORA, Bad for Authors

[alansz]

Every ORA contract I've signed has included a clause that if they do a new edition of your book, you have right of first refusal to author it. If it gets included in someone else's work, you get a cut proportional to the page count used. IANAL, but I don't think those contractual terms change even if the book goes out of print or gets released to the public under a different license.

mod_bandwidth

[jpkunst]

Another possibility is to use a certain feature of Apache, which lets you throttle bandwidth

mod_bandwidth [cohprog.com]. I have used it succesfully to prevent automatic downloaders from taking over our webserver.

JP