OLPC and CC Free Content Drive 92
gnujoshua writes "In his blog, SJ Klein, director of community content for OLPC, notes a collaboration among Creative Commons, One Laptop per Child, and TextbookRevolution.org. They are compiling together free and CC-licensed works — and they are asking for people to help them by submitting links to free books, movies, and music. Creative Commons will be burning a LiveDVD to be distributed at South by Southwest; OLPC will be making bundles of books to send all over the world; and Textbook Revolution will be compiling a list of good and free college-level textbooks for the relaunch of their site."
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Who needs the publishers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I took a course in Technical Business Writing for where as a final project we had to write a real manual for an existing product. That sort of class could easily churn out several good textbooks a semester.
Re:How to fund the structure of legitimate review? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, there is still some fixed cost to be absorbed somewhere in the chain to support the administration and management of legitimate peer review. Presently, publishers absorb this cost.
Not quite. Peer reviewers are not paid for their efforts, and the associate editors that manage them are not paid for their work. The only people that get paid in any of the journals in my discipline are the technical people responsible for actually assembling the articles, and possibly the top editor who oversees the associate editors. The actual cost of production is tiny compared to the price charged for a subscription.
A colleague of mine is involved in a small non-profit journal, and he figures he needs to charge less than half of what the mainstream journals do in order to cover his costs. Considering that the big journals will benefit from a substantially larger subscription/content ratio, they really are making out like bandits.
We have the tools within the academic and library communities to take control of our own publications, what we need is a shift in thinking, and some way to reward running a journal that is on par with the professional prestige associated with actually publishing in it.
yp.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
This is so very true. Copyright is theft.
Re:More important: relevant content by language (Score:1, Insightful)
Because we pride ourselves more on making meaningless gestures to the third-world than on producing real results. That's why we're providing them with laptop computers instead of basic infrastructure and medicine.
Nope (Score:3, Insightful)
With knowledge, and anything digitizable, the situation is radically different. This is moglen's point, and this is why people who use industrial-economy analogies to address free culture discussions only embarrass themselves. The situations are *radically different.
It's more like this: if Ernie tells you that 2+3 is 5, and you etch that knowledge into a granite chunk called "the internet" and reproduce it endlessly, even after your death.
As to what you're "depriving the creator" of, how many levels do you go up? Who told Ernie? Do you owe himher a few bucks?
After you die, when people look at the stone you carved and tell others, what are you being deprived of? k, you're dead, how about your children?
It's all a bunch of nonsense, and it proceeds from ignorance about the fundamentals
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More important: relevant content by language (Score:3, Insightful)
I would add sex education to the list..
Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who needs the publishers? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's needed are the professors and students to do this.
See my sig for a whole bunch of examples that already exist.
So of the best textbooks I had in college were published through the University printing department for the cost of materials.
My experience is that these days, that kind of thing tends to be much more expensive and inefficient that simply putting pdfs on the web. That's what I do for my students, and self-service laser printing on campus only costs them 4 cents a page (which is basically what it costs the school for paper and toner, and is much, much less than it would cost for the ink on a home inkjet printer). If I did it through my campus's bookstore, it would cost more like 8 cents a page. Part of the reason for that is that bookstores normally operate in a system where any books they don't sell, they just return to the publisher for a full refund. But course packets can't be returned, so the bookstore has to eat the extra cost of producing any copies they produced that ended up in a dumpster. To keep from taking a loss, they raise the price. Another factor that raises costs is that the course packs are being produced by paid workers, not by students on a self-serve basis, so the price has to include that labor cost. AFAICT, there are only three reasons any professors are still doing these course packs the old-fashioned way: (a) they don't own the rights to all the materials, and are paying the publisher for permission to use them, (b) they did their materials on a typewriter in 1962, and haven't gotten around to modernizing, or (c) they want to make a royalty. I think c is completely unethical when you're selling to your own students. There's a massive conflict of interest when you can force your students to buy something that puts money in your own pocket. If you want to make royalties from your writing, then ethically you really need to make those royalties from sales to other schools.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
The marginal cost is so low it's essentially zero. Not exactly zero, but really, really small.
Anyway, this is sort of a silly argument; it's not that anyone is unwilling to pay for the actual transportation of the bits across the network. What the whole copyright/IP argument revolves around is the ability for an author or creator to sell identical copies of the same work over and over again. It's the work that's at issue, not the cost of delivering it.
To further torture the car analogy, if you could magically turn one car into two cars, the value of the car itself would quickly tend towards zero. However, someone wishing to acquire a car would still have to pay for their free copy-of-a-car to be moved from wherever it was copied to their driveway. The transportation cost and value of the good itself are separate issues.
Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, don't depend on a derivative-based business model, because there's no way to make it work when anybody can just make copies for free, down the road.
Instead, just work like any other kind of skilled tradesman or professional. (Or, perhaps a more germane example, like a consultant.) If somebody wants you to design an automobile, bill them for the cost of designing an automobile. Whatever they want to do with the plans once they have them, is their business. They can make copies of them, eat them, use them for expensive designer toilet paper. Doesn't matter -- you've gotten your paycheck and have moved on to the next project.
The whole 'fight' about IP is mostly because people are used to, and have built corporate empires on, the idea of derivatives and annuitized incomes rather than simple payment-for-labor. This annuitization/derivatives model is fairly new (within the last few hundred years), and is certainly not a requirement for civilization, or for that matter the continued production of art, science, or technology.