O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System 134
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.)"
Copyright Term Self-Limitation (Score:5, Insightful)
We ought to applaude O'Reilly for acknowledging the importance of honoring the original intent of copyright to promote innovation and the limited term of protection for intellectual property to benefit individuals. They are one of the few corporate citizens who have broken ranks to speak out against the attempts by industry to make copyrights more or less permanent. But we should also note that O'Reilly has a bit less self-interest in promoting extended copyright protections due to the nature of the majority of their publication: technical publications that have a limited shelf life.
Really a wonderfull thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't count the number of times, I have gone to the bookstore, seen a topic of some interest, and then been completely destroyed by the price of the book. Can anyone really think that pricing textbooks at over a hundred dollars a copy is anything but an attempt to rip students off. Should it require a business case justification to learn something new.
Our whole society is becoming knowledge based, with skill and information as the new capital. If we want to continue to have a wealthy society we need to make access to knowledge easy for everyone. Dead tree models that price books to the skies will insure that we dont have a skilled or educated populace.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:4, Insightful)
My perspective is...if I'm an author, then I'm not going to be sitting on my hands for 14 years, soaking up the control-trip...I'll be writing more things along the way.
I think that since the original idea of copyright (Jefferson) was 14 years way back then...then it might even be ok for it to be even less than that, since publishing is almost costless with some mediums now and instantaneous as well.
14-year old computer books.... hmmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a nice gesture, but effectively useless.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly understand your point, however-- I actually think copyright is a good idea, and giving authors some control over their work for 30 years doesn't bug me (though maybe we should consider a different copyright term for computer software-- 15 years seems like a good term to me).
What DOES bug me is the idea of people managing copyrights older than any person alive, and we're starting to push pretty close to that limit (the melody to "Happy Birthday" was written in 1893; the lyrics were first published in 1924; the copyright expires in 2030). Copyright terms have definitely surpassed the limit of common benefit.
Re:14-year old computer books.... hmmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Software (Score:5, Insightful)
In any event -- the point of copyright is not to prevent the public from getting "a big taste" of how things work, but to allow the author sufficient opportunity to make money as to encourage the work's initial production. Permitting the public access to the source of 14-year-old software does little to harm copyright owners and much to widen the variety of sources available to curious tinkerers.
Re:It's things like this (Score:5, Insightful)
See, I think that when bad things happen in law, its only because people havn't realized that legislation or law that *sounds* like it will make you more money might actually not.
Imagine if O'Reilly books are free. More people get them. O'Reilly's mindshare in the market increases, and there is more demand since more people have O'Reilly books and everybody sings the praises of the quality of their product (which, fortunately is the case with O'Reilly.) Economically speaking, this *could* make O'Reilly more in the long run. Theres also a collary here; the companys that lobby most heavily often have some of the worst quality products; they simply want to rely on law to make it easier to make money without having to worry about quality. Controlling the law with dollars is much more risk free than depending on the quality of code your employees can produce.
I don't think its about being money leeches. All corperations have to be; its just that the ones with the balls (and confidence in their product) that figure out that sometimes letting some revenue go here and there in the interest of the public is actually *why* you might be able to bolster your bottom line in the long run.
And thats just a round about way of saying that citizens with access to the commons are also customers; and I *think* some companies still hold onto that time honoured truth that if you keep your customers happy, they'll probably be in better shape to make more money of their own, and more likely to hand some of that over to you in the future.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:5, Insightful)
On one small point, the maximum copyright period under the Founder's copyright scheme was 28 years -- 14 for the initial term plus one extension. That's a lot closer to three decades than two.
To address your main point: if you've written something so un-frigging-believably good, the work will stand on its own. It shouldn't need babying along. Even if it does, you have just shy of thirty years to promote the work. That's longer than most parents take to launch their children into a fully independent existence. By the time the copyright expires, your work should be suitably well known.
If it's not, then you should be glad for the free publicity that you would get from a Disney version. IIRC, they still have to credit the author of a public domain work, even if they don't have to pay you anything. Just a little "Based on $THE_BOOK_TITLE by $AUTHOR" in the credits is sure to cause some people to read it. And then they can give copies to their friends, because it's out of copyright.
Basically, you have two different desires going on here: you want your work to make money for you, and you want it to be widely read. These two desires can be at odds with each other: maybe your book it's the best thing since the Odyssey, but the price is too high, so very few people buy it. In this case, you haven't made much money and you haven't made a splash in the collective consciousness.
On the other hand, the two can be complementary: say your work goes public domain, and all of a sudden it's the inspiration for three new plays, two movies, a parody, and a children's book. In this case, you aren't making any money from it directly . . . but you are making a large splash. And once you've made that big splash, people are bound to ask "Well, what else have you written?" And then you can point out all the OTHER fantastic books you've been writing that are still under copyright. You HAVE been continuing to write, right? You'd have to, against the day when the first one goes out into the big scary world and leaves you behind. So now you've got the fame to go with, and your books are selling like hotcakes, and life is good.
Re:Copyright trade (Score:4, Insightful)
Trading the pair of shoes that I made to my neighbor in exchange for a bag a wheat is easy. In the end I have a bag of wheat and he has a pair of shoes.
This is different than if I exchange a book on how to make shoes for a bag of wheat. The knowledge of shoe making is more flexible and can radically change in value than a simple bag of wheat or a pair of shoes.
(excuse me if that was a gross misinterpretation, but that's how I read it)
Just looking at computers today, I'm not sure I agree. How much is a cutting edge Pentium 4 going to cost me today? How much is that same computer going to cost me next year? Within a short time that object significantly loses value. The same goes for ideas/books. What about the value of a book on how to operate my computer? For most people, it will be worthless in a few years. For my grandparents, however, should they have to pay a ridiculous amount for something that is valuable to them but worthless to everyone people? Or worse yet, what if this book is out of print? Take another book: The Lord of the Rings. As great literature, it will never be worthless.
Both ideas and physical objects can radically change in value. What's great about this is that those books that are worthless to nearly everyone, including the author(s), can be availible to those that do value them.
Re:Software (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:14-year old computer books.... hmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, I am not sure how old "the Art of Programming" is but I am sure that it will still be quite usefull in 14 more years.
Re:Free book cost real money (for us) (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you could make back some of that $15,000 by writing about how to release something for free to the audience and the publisher...
Re:14-year old computer books.... hmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Some things, yes, but then there's things like McConnel's Code Complete, or Numerical Recipes, or Knuth's Art of Computer Programming.
Granted, O'Reilly doesn't sell a whole lot of these things. Though they do have a vi pocket guide.
If you get First Post, then Disney can't (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd want control over it long enough for a perception of it to soak into collective consciousness before it got Disney-raped or something.
Keeping Disney's paws off your work can be done with "first mover" marketing, including official merchandising and licensing to a movie studio within a few years after publication. For example, J. K. Rowling is doing this with her Harry Potter series of novels about a young wizard in training. Such a "first mover" strategy doesn't need life plus 70 to be effective.
Re:Free book cost real money (for us) (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll be making a tiny tiny amount of money writing about this for O'Reilly Networks, but there's a huge gap between what you can get by writing and the amount of the bandwidth bill. I have to hope Level 3 has humanity.
Re:Copyright trade (Score:5, Insightful)
You're mixing up "price" and "value," but even if we assume that the value will be measured by looking at the price, you're still wrong: why does the price of CPUs drop? The main reasons are the devlopment of new, improved CPU designs, and advances in production technology. Those however are not physical goods but "ideas."
In other words, the value (price) of physical goods degrades not because they're physical (that might be the case for with high wear and tear, but that's a predictable process, not a "radical change in value"). It degrades because of the invention of new products -- in other words, because of ideas.
Also note that while physical goods lose value, the value of most ideas will increase. How valueable, for example, is the "idea" of electricity? Or the transistor? These are also both good examples of how the value of ideas can change in a very radical way, as claimed by the original poster: the invention of the transistor radically changed the value of electricity. Likewise, the invention of technologies for global-scale computer networks radically changed the value of computers.
Re:Really a wonderfull thing (Score:1, Insightful)
Now the bookstores, they make a lot of money since the mark-up is nearly 100%, and then they but the book back at 30% of it's original value and then re-sell it at 50-60%.
If more bookstores existed, prices could be lower (competition) and the internet has helped this. I wouldn't mind buying a textbook right from the author/publisher for $40. Buying it from a bookstore for $95 is a different issue.
Re:Think Id (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a key feature of Id's release scheme that you have to take into account, though. You can't take what Id has released and create a fully functioning Quake. That's because although they have released the source, they have not released the level files which make the game.
That way, they can still sell the game (as part of a bargain anthology or something) if and when they want to.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What is your book? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ambivalence (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Software (Score:3, Insightful)
At some point it costs the corporation more to dig up and make a copy for distribution than anyone is willing to pay for it. When this happens, it is impossible for them to make any more money off of this product.
Windows 1.0 probably falls into this category.
OTOH, it also costs something to dig it up and release it for free. With books it's a little different, since the book's content is already out there.
I wouldn't be suprized to find that the Window 1.0 source code no longer exists. In that case, the cost to release it for free is enormous.
Re:Ambivalence (Score:2, Insightful)
Good for ORA, Bad for Authors (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Software (Score:3, Insightful)
'95 won't be useful in 2023 if for no other reason but that it won't be compatible with any hardware for which folks can still buy replacement parts -- it's incompatible with a good part of the hardware in most new systems now.