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.)"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Think Id (Score:5, Interesting)
One more reason why I like O'Reilly
What is your book? (Score:1, Interesting)
What is your book?
It's things like this (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be great... (Score:5, Interesting)
How many times have you picked up a book for a research paper and it was dated from the 60s or 70s?
Even then, I doubt that many people will get the extension... so we're talking 80 and soon to be 90s.
Copyright trade (Score:4, Interesting)
Money is simplyfing things, of course, but the question is, if the thing which you trade for the money rather than for things you produce yourself, has the anymore same quality or will it become something different.
Trading just things is easy, object remains object even after trade, you can still preted that it is _really_ the same object.
Ideas are more flexible and their base value can change far more radically.
Ambivalence (Score:5, Interesting)
But under two decades.... I don't know. For one thing, if I wrote something famous, 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. For another, the more substantial you make the time period you have copyright, the more you can recover risk/opportunity costs associated with a work -- or other works that didn't make it (indefinite or 75 years is waaay too long, but I don't think 30 is).
Re:Software (Score:4, Interesting)
The flip side of the coin is that software is incremental, unless there is a revolution in the software it will most likely take an evolutionary path. So if the copyright expires too quickly you can get a big taste of things like the Windows design and implementation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
When does the copyright on Open Source expire? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ambivalence (Score:3, Interesting)
VERY interesting point...
How, then, about a shorter copyright, BUT with a
"No-one Can Harm Its Worth" period?
Sorta:
I publish work, non-bothering to register copyright, thereby getting minimum protection, or actually-registering it, gaining more protection.
My right to EXCLUSIVELY-OWN the work expires after awile, but...
For another while, it may be used only under liberal 'fair use' rules, in other words, no use that mutates it into something monstrous, and .. some of 'em have it, and have for centuries...
Community-use, rather than commercial/political-use, for instance, and no 'community' use that reverses its intent, like the Nazi's did with the broken-cross that was a part of the Buddhist [schumachersociety.org] Mandalas [bremen.de] for, oh, a couple of thousand years, and are a representation of the fractal nature of phenomena-reality, and how stopping the endless reductionism/entanglement and 'falling-through' into being enlightened nothingness is possible, and freedom.
Sorry I can't find one that has that, specifically on it, but
the painting I link to, however, gives-you the sense of what these things are... )
3 phases, then:
owning,
sharing(community),
free.
Incredibly true (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Computer books, anyone? Especially those with CDs...
Re:Ambivalence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Absolutely agree in the "sit on your hands" argument. The thing I'm anticipating... while it doesn't take much time to achieve modest success with a work, it takes a while for it to permeate most of society. So there's some financial concern with that, yes, but my bigger concern is creative/artistic. OK, so, say I'm Victor Hugo (even though there's no resemblance), and I'm just getting started and write this "Hunchback of Notre Dame" novel. It's not quite as accessible as, say, your average John Grisham novel, but it's pretty good, and a number of people like it. Disney, wanting new material, decides they like it too. They ask for film rights. I say, OK, but insist on preserving character of the book. They hum and haw, then decide they don't like me. A few years later, the copyright goes, and they do whatever they like. Mass-marketed and watered down, it goes to screen. Lots of people who might have actually liked the book the way it was get a different impression of what the story is, and decide never to pick it up.
If the copyright is longer, the idea of the book has more time to permeate society, so people can at least compare....
Or imagine you're Michael Crichton, and you have these books called "Jurassic Park" or "The Lost World"... oh. wait.
Re:When does the copyright on Open Source expire? (Score:3, Interesting)
That what is written X years ago becomes public domain. Linux 0.9 is not same than Linux 2.5.
Re:14-year old computer books.... hmmmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Free book cost real money (for us) (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, I hosted the book on a server run by a friend at a Level 3 co-location, which charges by the 9th busiest hour. In 36 hours, we had 10,000 downloads of an average of 20 Mb each. Right. So we hit potentially a $15,000 bill for the ninth busiest hour being 16 Mbps (the first 1 Mbps was included in his monthly bill).
So I'm screwed here, of course, and trying to raise a dollar or two from folks who downloaded the book and found it useful. We don't know the final bill, and we don't know whether Level 3 will negotiate. This is more like a natural disaster than a business decision.
If I'd been smart, of course, I would have distributed the download to many sites with no bandwidth fees or limited numbers of simultaneous users. I just thought we'd get a few hundred downloads. Not 10,000.
Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source, (Score:2, Interesting)
And if that's true, it explains a lot. I can't tell you how many times I've had trouble with some kind of wacky typesetting in an O'Reilly book. Wouldn't using Tex or something avoid all of that?
Case in point: while I was still relatively new to Python, I picked up a book from them. Python sometimes prefixes variables with a double underscore, which, when run together in the typesetting, is difficult to distinguish from a single underscore.
</rant>Disclosing original PD works in © registration (Score:3, Interesting)
No credit required.
Though the author of a work that's derivative of a pre-1923 work does not have to list the original work in advertising, he still has to list the original work on the U.S. copyright registration.
Re:Free book cost real money (for us) (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:License? (Score:1, Interesting)
Knuth (Score:5, Interesting)
TWW
Re:Free book cost real money (for us) (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen situations where the P2P client is built into a browser plugin or Java app. For an example of this, see the Open Content Network [open-content.net], which provides distributed downloading free for content under an approved license.
Money is not like copyrights (Score:3, Interesting)
Howerver, with copying it is a totally differnnt thing. I'd say 99.99% of people who copy music or whatever are not attempting to fradulently misrepresent themselves as the original creator, they just want to listen to, share, or distribute information at their disposal.
Unfortunately, inspite of all his positive contributions, Lessing adamantly refuses to accept that copying things is a basic moral right, and when you restrict that (yes even for only 14 years) you are violating someone. A violation that the information age will simply not accept even if it is for 10 minutes. Here it is important to understand that information is so easy to copy and manipulate that there can be no room for middle ground - either you will half to attempt to controll all of it, or loose controll. The RIAA and MPAA understand that, and so should we.
The "Lessing" movement does not understand history. It reminds me of the people in the 1850's who desperately tried to make appeasements so that the free states could peacfully get along with the slave states. - just as the industrial revolution created forces that had to end slavery without appeasement, so does the information age half to get rid of copyright monopolies - all of them, no matter how radical and unappeasing that sounds. The real problem isn't a more sincere copyright, it is a failure to understand how evil copyrights really are.
Re:License? (Score:3, Interesting)
We take inspiration from other folks interested in promoting the sharing of creative works. Foremost among these is Richard Stallman, founder of The Free Software Foundation and author of the General Public License, or the GNU GPL. We want to complement, rather than compete with, these existing efforts to ease online sharing and collaboration. Right now we don't plan to get involved in software licensing at all. Instead, we'll concentrate on scholarship, film, literature, music, photography, and other kinds of creative works.
Re:Ambivalence (LOTR history) (Score:2, Interesting)
Some one in the publisher's employ forgot to renew the copyright after 14 years. Within a very short time, many publishers came out with editions of LOTR. My impression ws that Tolkien's estate did not do well as a consequence of the copyright loss. I'm not sure whether Tolkien was still alive at time of the outburst of copyright-free publication; does anyone know?
What I am sure of is that the three volumes of LOTR didn't take off until low cost copies were on the market.
Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source, (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, the problem is not that O'Reilly doesn't accept OpenOffice.org formatted documents as that the O'Reilly author template is not available for OOo. O'Reilly requires authors to format chapters using O'Reilly standard styles. For Word, O'Reilly supplies a template that includes macros, menus, and so on to make this formatting process very simple and quick. There is no such template available for OOo, which means authors have to embed the appropriate O'Reilly styles manually, which is much more time-consuming and error-prone than the automated tools available for Word.
The other problem with OOo isn't caused by O'Reilly, or at least not entirely. OOo munges some of the O'Reilly styles, and doesn't deal well with some embedded images. For example, I was revising one chapter document I'd created in Word for the current edition of a book. In that chapter, I'd used the "Sidebar" style. When I called up that document in OOo Writer, that entire section was invisible. Nothing I did in OOo would render it visible. Similarly, in one case an embedded image not only failed to display, but all text from the caption for that image down to the next section break disappeared entirely.
If O'Reilly created an OOo template, I might convert to OOo for creating new chapters. But until OOo fixes some of the problems with rendering Word 2000 documents, I can't really use OOo to revise existing chapters. It's a shame, really. I'd very much like to dispense with Word entirely and migrate to OOo under both Windows and Linux. But OOo isn't quite good enough yet for me to do that.