O'Reilly Commits to Short Copyright Durations 382
Sam King writes "I found the following link on the lisnews.com site: O'Reilly Adopts 1790 Copyright Durations. A small but encouraging step taken by a publisher." We should provide direct links to O'Reilly's announcement and the Founder's Copyright website.
Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, sometimes good ideas come out of old books, ideas that were valid then and still valid today. I imagine "Unix in a nutshell" will be as useful twenty years from now as it is today.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's part of the reason to keep copyrights short. Encourage more diverse growth. Why invent a new character when you have a monopoly on the one you've got?
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2)
Because it's boring.
I don't know about you, but I have a son that'll be 4 in June. He's really into Dinosaur. [imdb.com] Ya know, that 100% CG movie with Aladar and the Lemurs and the Carataurs and all that. I know I'd plink down cash for a sequal to that. Same goes for a Toy Story 3 (should one ever get made). A CG Mickey?
Booooooring...
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Funny)
Political speech with public domain (Score:5, Interesting)
Humor aside, it's the political speech that scares the crap out of corporations. Disney *knows* that people are going to pound them the minute their stuff gets into public domain.
For music, however, they have no excuse. Some really terrific stuff can come out of public domain music. The political stuff will be irrelevant in this area, I believe. If people aren't buying music, they are searching for popular music for free. Few people, if anybody, search for political music. The '60s protest rock is the extent of my political noise.
Re:Political speech with public domain (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a few very political bands/artists of note: R.E.M., Annie DiFranco, Pearl Jam, System of a Down
Also, although I agree that copyrights should be shorter (but not non-existent), I'm not sure that I buy your reason for Disney and other corporations not wanting things to go into the public domain. In what way is anybody's ability to say what they want politically related to whether or not Disney owns the copyright on Steamboat Willy? I don't think Disney wants the copyright on any of their cartoons to expire because then they lose their monopoly on the Mickey Mouse name, not because of political motivations.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2)
Re:But do they ever actually lose the character? (Score:5, Interesting)
But I haven't seen it come up much. There's the Comedy III Productions thing; the Amos 'n Andy case is vaguely related.
However, there is a very important caveat. Consider Mickey Mouse: the original Mickey Mouse from the 1928 shorts (Steamboat Willy, The Galloping Gaucho, and Plane Crazy) looks and acts and talks differently than the 'modern' Mickey.
If the copyright on the original Mickey expired, you could create new works that were derivative of that. But they could NOT be derivative of later works that were still copyrighted. So the later changes to the character (e.g. facial structure) couldn't be used by you, though you could change your own Mickey in new ways.
Re:But do they ever actually lose the character? (Score:2, Insightful)
The character might be copyrighted
But then again, it might not [asu.edu] thanks to a faulty copyright notice.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Informative)
Still the original spirit of the copyright law envisioned by the founders is not being kept...
Re:Interesting but... (Score:4, Informative)
Mickey isn't the real issue. It's Winnie the Pooh (who first appeared in "When We Were Very Young", copyright 1924).
Disney currently makes ~ $4 billion dollars/year off of Pooh-related movies, books, games, toys, clothing, breakfast cereals, bedroom furnishings, toiletries, etc. etc. etc.
See: "The Curse of Pooh" [fortune.com].
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Informative)
The copyrights for Steamboat Willy are for the screenplay and the actual movie only. These copyrights should have run out long ago.
Even if "Steamboat Willy" becomes public domain people would still have to pay Disney to use Mickey Mouse.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then it doesn't sound like it's in the public domain to me. The only sensible answer is that the trademark on the character cannot block other people from using the character in order to make derivative works or to duplicate the existing public domain works.
It sounds like a nominative use to me -- it _IS_ Mickey Mouse. There's no getting around it. It isn't as though the derivative creators can reaso
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2)
Then it doesn't sound like it's in the public domain to me.
Steamboat Willy isn't the same as Mickey Mouse
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Likewise with Aladdin, you can make Aladdin movies, but if in your movie Aladdin had a pet monkey, the princess had a pet tiger, and Jaffar had a pet parrot, you'd probably be hearing from Disney's lawyers.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
In your mind I assume that the works of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, etc. should all still be copyright protected because they still hold value? I am not sure how you can justify that one.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow. Are you way off base. Copyright is the legal recognition of an author's natural property rights over his creation.
It is intended to be a short term incentive to artists to create and be rewarded for their work.
It is intended to provide legal protection for the rights of creators, just as laws against burglary extend legal protection to the rights of property owners.
Copyright
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a fundamental assumption of the Founding Fathers that no man could own an idea or an invention, that all creative work was derivate of work that came before it, and therefore that it must eventually be given over to the public (in essence, nothing you do in this regard is ever truly original). One of the great Orwellian word-plays of the day is to take intellectual labor and turn it into intellectual 'property', equating it to physical property. Just look how many people buy into the nonsense, and actually argue in support of it!
Copyrights are not about protecting property but about protecting the motivation of people to create, by giving them a decent time to profit from creativity. There is no 'property' in these endeavors, nor has there ever been any property. The entire concept of property is utterly irrelevant when it comes to copyright, although there are plenty of brainwashed idiots who take what's spoon-fed to them and parrot it endlessly, letting others do their thinking for them.
The problem with long copyrights is relatively straight-forward: what you invent is by necessity based upon all relevant inventions, research, and science that's gone before you. Your invention would not have been possible if these things had not been available to you. Overly long copyrights make it possible to stifle or even bring creation to a screeching halt because they profit only those invested in the status quo. Why bother to invent thing x if Company ABC is going to sue you for it, or require an enormous licensing fee, because your invention stands upon the shoulders of what they've done? In essence, these copyright laws claim that Company ABC is perfectly justified in claiming ownership not only in what they invented, but also everything that's gone before their invention - and that future potential inventors aren't allowed to do the same.
Remember, we live in a society where copyright extends to 1-click shopping and naturally occurring phenomena, like genes. You don't even have to invent something derivate, you simply have to yell 'dibs!' fast enough to get a patent. And once you do, it's wholely within your power to put an end to any invention based upon whatever you've copyrighted, or to make the price of entry so high most folks won't bother.
According to the U.S. Constitution, the highest law in the land, there exists one and only one justifiable reason for copyright:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
Anything else is bullshit, and uncontitutional besides.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Locke talks about propery being created from things found in nature to which a person has added "the Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands" (from his Second Treatise, On Property.) The argument in Second Treatise clearly applies to actual labour, not ideas--read it and see. Also, read Nozick's commentary in Anarchy, State and Utopia. He agrees that property rights can not be claimed if by appropriating something from a state of nature, the rights of someone else are noticeably worse
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wasn't the one who dragged natural rights into this in the first place and, as mentioned by you (or some other equally indistinguishable AC--do you mind getting an ID so I can at least try not to tar other faceless people with my brush, such as it is?), natural rights are a value thesis. Arguing value theses will run into
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hard to argue with the old "they are because I say they are." It may be pat
Re:Interesting but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with your objection that copyright intervals should not be tied to some perceived (and, no doubt subjectively determined) intrinsic "value" to a work.
However, if a work does have high value, as measured by the degree to which it can be exploited in the market place for profit, there will be a desire on the part of the copyright holder to retain the copyright as long as possible. Hence, high-priced lobbying for effectively infinite copyright terms and extentions.
Understanding this, I wonder if it would be unreasonable to permit copyright extentions, at increasing cost, beyond the initial term (granted at no cost because of no need to formally file to get protection). The revenues collected could be redirected back to promote the development of new works.
Yes, this smells like a tax, and, as a libertarian, there are few things I detest more than taxes, particularly new ones. However, the only protection one has for a monopoly to reproduce and distribute an original work, is consent of the consumer, presumably obtained (if not by direct contract), by laws relating to issues of what could be called "intellectual property" (encompassing copyright, patent, and trademarks, in different ways). Enforcing such protection requires funding, and this "extended copyright tax" could also be a source of that funding.
These are partially baked ideas, and I reiterate that my initial reaction to such a "tax" revolts me, but I would not dismiss the notion of financial consideration in exchange for granted copyright extention out of hand.
dont slashdot o'reilly (Score:5, Informative)
Santa Clara, CA--Technology publisher O'Reilly & Associates has launched the latest of its initiatives to shake up the intellectual property establishment. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference today, founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly announced his company's commitment to applying the Founders' Copyright to O'Reilly books.
Developed by Creative Commons, the Founders' Copyright is a legal option that allows copyright holders to voluntarily release their works to the public after the period envisioned in the original 1790 US copyright law--14 years, with the option of one 14-year extension. O'Reilly will be releasing its books under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits others to copy and distribute work as long as they give the original author and publisher credit.
"Copyright law is a foundation of my business," said O'Reilly. "But the original copyright balance has been distorted to tip heavily in favor of creators and publishers. The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act increased the copyright term to the author's life plus seventy years, yet only a few works are still in active use over that length of time. This copyright extension, enacted to protect a small number of very valuable works, has had the unintended consequence of depriving the public of access to a far greater number of other works."
"As a publisher, I want to profit fairly from my work, but also nourish the intellectual commons. It's in my best interest to ensure that the public domain continues to be a deep well from which we all can draw. By adopting the Founders' Copyright, my company can protect our intellectual property for a reasonable term, and then give it back to the public."
Although in most cases it owns the rights to the books it has published, O'Reilly will release books under the Founders' Copyright only with the author's permission. The company is in the process of soliciting that permission, and 80% of the authors who have responded to date have agreed to honor the Founders' Copyright. O'Reilly is also applying the Creative Commons Attribution license to hundreds of out-of-print books, pending author approval.
O'Reilly has been exploring alternative forms of copyright and content licensing since the January, 1995 release of the "Linux Network Administrator's Guide." Author Olaf Kirch posted the first version of the book online in September 1993, and when O'Reilly offered to publish a print version, Kirch wanted to ensure that the content of the book was still freely available, as Linux was. O'Reilly agreed, publishing the book under the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation License, and contributing its extensive edits back into the online version. In his preface to the print book, Kirsch noted, "In my view, the great service O'Reilly is doing to the Linux community (apart from the book becoming readily available at your local bookstore) is that it may help Linux be recognized as something to be taken seriously."
O'Reilly has since released a number of books under various open source licenses, either because the author requested it or because the book's sales didn't warrant keeping it in print, but the content was very useful to a particular group of people. A complete list of available titles is at www.oreilly.com/openbook. As they implement the Founders' Copyright, O'Reilly will continue to make more titles available online under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Re:dont slashdot o'reilly (Score:2, Informative)
O'Reilly has been around on the net forever and has withstood many major slashdottings without faltering.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Funny)
According to the short article: Although thirty-year-old computer science manuals aren't in particularly high demand, this is a good move towards restoring the "growth" rate of the public domain. "
I don't suppose they have any COBOL titles?!?
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Until no one tries to file a patent on an idea that's described in the book.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
TAOCP books (1--3) are considered essential, but have only had minor changes over the years (and reformatted into TeX).
Will "Windows 3.1 Annoyances" be useful in 20 years? Of course not. But regular expressions won't change, emacs won't change (flamesuit on!), lex/yacc won't change. I'd bet 5-10% of O'reilly's title are "timeless" informaion.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Copyright has nothing at all to do with usefulness. Why even this post is covered by copyright, and look how useful it is...
Copyright is about control. Control plus useful equals profit. That's why Intellectual Property is becomming problematic. Anything which is useful enough to be profitable runs the risk of having a hidden IP timebomb which could wrest control from the developer.
Without a self imposed limitation like this, no publisher in his right mind
Talk to the VIC 20 guys (Score:3, Interesting)
Look, in 28 years, some as-yet-unborn geeks are going to run Pentium IV emulators so they can install RedHat 9 and see how bad things really were 'back in the day'. They'll probably need some 2003 O'Reilly books to figure out what to do.
Re:Interesting but... (Score:3, Insightful)
All
Correct link (Score:5, Informative)
Well, ok, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
O'Reilly's gesture is a good and excellent thing of course, but most of their titles are computer books that will be obsolete in six months and useless in three years, so having it enter the public domain in 28 years isn't all that impressive
Now if we could get Tim to enter the recording industry...
G.
Re:Well, ok, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
That of course, is the whole point. Usually publishers just let a book hang in 'out-of-print but copyrighted' limbo. Maybe in 28 years you'd like to put a copy of "Perl in a nutshell" online, just to show people how much the state-of-the-art has advanced. Or even degraded.. Who are you to say that if a work is not economically valuable it is worthless in every other respect? Conventional publishers don't think so, that's why they hang on to the copyright no-matter-what, to the detriment of the public interest.
Re:Well, ok, but... (Score:2)
They not only have shorted copyright legnths, but also have started an initiative with many american univeristies to offer access to _all_ of thier books online at no cost to the student. The schools might pay a fee similar to that which is paid to the ACM or IEEE, but it shows they are willing to allow access to thier material when it is important, but otherwise hindered by financial
Re:Well, ok, but... (Score:2)
As others have mentioned, what about books on programming techniques and style ? Those should not go out of "style" but be adapted to new languages/methodologies.
Another book example is K&R C Guide (sitting on the shelf next to me). That book is the definitiv
this is good (Score:3, Informative)
I can't remember O'Reilly ever fucking up in a big way (alas they had their share of heat) and their right to rake a decent profit (otherwise no more O'Reilly books and now that would be a shame) goes undisputed.
I like this move. I really do.
Re:this is good (Score:3, Insightful)
When the copyright expires, are they going to give the ebooks to efforts like Project Gutenburg?
Can't wait till that copyright runs out (Score:5, Funny)
But seriously, O'Reilly has done a lot more important stuff in copyright but this is laughable. He is not publishing Steamboat Willie or Moby Dick.
Re:Can't wait till that copyright runs out (Score:2, Insightful)
More importantly, you will have access to those manuals in 14 years without having to chase down out-of-print hardcopys or worrying about defunct publishers that can't even make a new copy if they wanted to. You would be suprised how often pe
For what it's worth... (Score:3, Informative)
As far as 28 years for computer texts go, if you're talking about something like Using Java 1.2, then yes most of the information within it would be dated. However, if you're talking about books along the line of 'Solving Real World Problems with Logical Representations', then the concepts would still be useful, even if the examples require modernization. (And there's no such exact book that I know of, th
Re:Can't wait till that copyright runs out (Score:2, Redundant)
The fact of the matter is that for a company like O'Reilly, it probably doesn't make sense from a business perspective to hold onto the copyrights for that long. As you've so brilliantly pointed out, there is little call nowadays for Perl 3 books. That, my friend, is exactly the point!
In th
Yeah, but the shelf life.... (Score:2, Funny)
Yes they are relevant after 14 years (Score:4, Insightful)
While many OS specific manual may be woefully obsolete in 14 years many of the underlying concepts are not and many of O'reilly's works that were put out now a decade ago still have valid and relevant information for todays information age.
Just because they're outdated (Score:3, Insightful)
Go into CS books, O'Reilly (Score:2, Interesting)
How to know if copyright is expired (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to know if copyright is expired (Score:2)
Re:How to know if copyright is expired (Score:3, Informative)
No. It is life+70 if the author is an individual; if it is a corporation (which could live very long or die quickly), it is simply 90 years.
Old Manuals are often very good (Score:5, Insightful)
Not always true. Well written computer science books can often be timeless, and occasionally software can last that long or longer. An example is Maxima (http://maxima.sf.net) which was largely written back in the late sixties and early seventies and is still active today. I'm involved with the documentation effort on that project, and we would dearly love to be able to include the older manuals written about the system. Recreating docs is not simple!
There are also other very good reasons for these books to survive even if their subject matter doesn't do so well - 1) If the manuals are collected in a huge central archive as their copyrights expire and they become free, then the poor sucker who has to deal with a rare and/or obscure legacy system will have a place to go 2) The design and usage priciples of the software will be documented. They may suck, but old program != bad ideas. In fact, quite the contrary. Look at TeX, or Emacs. Old programs, but masterpieces of their art.
Don't knock old manuals. Yes there are huge amounts of crap out there in the computer world, but don't casually throw away knowledge. Even of old computer systems. You never know when you might wish you still had it.
Good Oreilly (Score:2, Redundant)
I dunno about you guys, but all these things make me look at Oreilly books before any other.
Thanks again Oreilly!
Re:Good Oreilly (Score:2)
It's called the "we're not uncompromising assholes" business model. It's an indication that O'Reilly is a good businessman, who understands how to keep those paychecks coming in for the long-term.
Companies like Microsoft (grow, grow, grow; stomp, stomp, stomp) or American Airlines (their crappy CEOs) or Disney (bribing SC senators) or Radio Shack (damned expensive adaptors...) or ENRON (again, shitty CEOs) or any
O'Reilly Just Beastiality Porn (Score:5, Funny)
Sick-o's
Re:O'Reilly Just Beastiality Porn (Score:3, Funny)
The point is well taken... (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words: now that technology is useful for a shorter and shorter time, it's important to make the inventors and artist of such technology able to have control rights over it for even longer periods of time.
For at such a rate the day will come when you invent of create something on the spot and spure of them moment to solve a one time problem and then own rights to it even after you have been dead
The day when we can no longer breath cause someone already did.
Re:The point is well taken... (Score:2)
The vast majority of publications have always had a short (or even non-existant) profitable life-span. Most either turn a profit in the first year, or never. However, there are certain copyrighted works that have either held their value, or steadily increased in value, over the years. A number of Disney properties spring to mind as examples. The owners of those properties obviously have a strong economic interest in extending the duratio
Woohoo! (Score:2)
Hold that purchase, I can wait! (Score:2, Funny)
Then why have I been buying them, when I can wait?
Good, but there's an even better way... (Score:5, Interesting)
An even better idea is the Baen Free Library [baen.com]
It makes much more sense to put older works out there for everyone at no charge in order to generate interest in newer works. And it's been working just like that for Baen. I know that I've bought quite a few books from various Baen authors after reading some of their work through the Free Library.
Re:Good, but there's an even better way... (Score:2)
O'Reilly is doing that now.
They've got several free books available at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/ [oreilly.com].
Some of these are new content that is freely available because of the wishes of the authors, i.e. DocBook: The Definitive Guide and Free as in Freedom.
Some of them are out of print books, i.e. The Future Does Not Compute and Volume 6A: Motif Programming Manual.
Woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Copyright idea - pay for longer terms? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not make copyrights variable? The author could choose to accept the free default (short) copyright, or pay to register for a longer one. And the extra premium you pay for additional years gets more expensive the longer you want it.
Ok, in order to clarify what I mean, how's this for an example.
20 years copyright: Free, no registration required.
30 years: $10,000 registration fee
40 years: $25,000 registration fee
50 years: $100,000 registration fee
75 years: $1,000,000 registration fee
That way, if you're a big company like Disney and you have something you think will be big, you can pay more to lock it up longer. But if you're willing to let your stuff go into the public domain sooner you don't pay anything.
Maybe you would allow a copyright holder to change their mind and extend the copyrights later. If you didn't regiser to extend it and your product was a big hit, maybe you could sign up for the longer protection at a later time. Although I think that should be even more expensive than buying the longer copyright protection up front since you could wait till you see how successful your product is before registering (less risk = more cost).
Even better would be a way to make the copyright charge based on the "value" of the property. Like you'd pay more for a long copyright on Star Wars than you would for a long copyright on Battlestar Galactica. I have no idea how that would work, but it would obviously be a better system than a fixed rate since people who make less from their item don't pay as much to register it.
I don't know if even *I* like this idea, but it seemed to me that it might be worth throwing out there. Thoughts?
Re:Copyright idea - pay for longer terms? (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Settle for the 20 year copyright.
2. Sell your soul to some big monolithic corporation who will own you till the end of time.
Sounds suspiciously like what's wrong with the music industry right now.
Re:Copyright idea - pay for longer terms? (Score:4, Insightful)
The fees should not be tied to product value. The fees should be universal and indexed for inflation. The fee should actively DISCOURAGE hoarding of works that won't be published.
I would settle for $1 fee (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Copyright idea - pay for longer terms? (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, if IP is truly property it should also be inheritable. One should be able to go through life releasing high-quality works, making enough off of each one just to get by, and then be able to leave the collected works to one's children.
Re:Copyright idea - pay for longer terms? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know, you might try working for the intervening forty years, just like the rest of the world. I didn't write my first computer program then retire on the proceeds. No, I keep writing new software. Movie makers film new movies, musician record new albums, and writers write more books. Maybe sometime in those forty years you could manage at least one more book? Is it that bloody hard? Melville wrote a number of books after Moby Dick [melville.org], why can't you?
Any copyrights that continue to exist are inherited. That would be why copyright is Life + 70 years for human copyright holders. Of course, shouldn't you spend some time raising your kids to get their own jobs, or at least write their own books?
because *BSD is dead (Score:2)
The Start of Choice (Score:4, Interesting)
And copyright law becomes an issue of choice, in the same way that you still have the choice to close-source your software. You think copyright terms should be shorter? Vote with your work. You think it should be 130 years? You have that option.
This is just what I'd expect from a publisher who espouses the value of choice, including the choice to not share. This could be good.
Re:The Start of Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideas are not property. Inventions are not property. Copyright laws weren't invented to protect 'property' (there are other laws for this, dealing with 'theft') but to allow creative sorts some measure of time to profit from their work before said work was turned over to the commons.
It was a fundamental assumption of the Founding Fathers that no man could own an idea or an invention, that all creative work was derivate of work that came before it, and therefore that it must eventually be given over to the public (in essence, nothing you do in this regard is ever truly original). One of the great Orwellian word-plays of the day is to take intellectual labor and turn it into intellectual 'property', equating it to physical property. Just look how many people buy into the nonsense, and actually argue in support of it!
Copyrights are not about protecting property but about protecting the motivation of people to create, by giving them a decent time to profit from creativity. There is no 'property' in these endeavors, nor has there ever been any property. The entire concept of property is utterly irrelevant when it comes to copyright, although there are plenty of brainwashed idiots who take what's spoon-fed to them and parrot it endlessly, letting others do their thinking for them.
The problem with long copyrights is relatively straight-forward: what you invent is by necessity based upon all relevant inventions, research, and science that's gone before you. Your invention would not have been possible if these things had not been available to you. Overly long copyrights make it possible to stifle or even bring creation to a screeching halt because they profit only those invested in the status quo. Why bother to invent thing x if Company ABC is going to sue you for it, or require an enormous licensing fee, because your invention stands upon the shoulders of what they've done? In essence, these copyright laws claim that Company ABC is perfectly justified in claiming ownership not only in what they invented, but also everything that's gone before their invention - and that future potential inventors aren't allowed to do the same.
Remember, we live in a society where copyright extends to 1-click shopping and naturally occurring phenomena, like genes. You don't even have to invent something derivate, you simply have to yell 'dibs!' fast enough to get a patent. And once you do, it's wholely within your power to put an end to any invention based upon whatever you've copyrighted, or to make the price of entry so high most folks won't bother.
According to the U.S. Constitution, the highest law in the land, there exists one and only one justifiable reason for copyright:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; "
Anything else is bullshit, and uncontitutional besides.
Max
Will the authors have a say? (Score:2, Interesting)
Authors retain the copyright to most books published in the United States; they simply license reproduction and distribution rights to a publisher. Terms vary, but typically the rights revert to the author when the book goes out-of-print. So my original question was how can the O'Reily (the publisher) decide to release something to the public domain?
But now I see a strange pattern as I investigate the books on my nearest shelf. Every copyright notice has the author's name except for the O'Reily books.
Copyrighted content is like a capacitor... (Score:2)
So why do content holders insist on 90+ years? I can think of three reasons:
1. There is still money to be made occasionally from historic pieces.
2. They fear free content would divert consumers from newer content.
3. Whil
GPLed works (Score:4, Insightful)
Imagine what would happen if Torvalds and Stallman committed to this. Versions of the Linux kernel from 1990 would be available under public domain terms in a year, and versions of emacs and gcc would already be available. It'd be interesting if all the anti-copyleft people who call the GPL "viral" would be sufficiently anti-GPL enough to fork a 14 year old version.
Changes are coming in tech publishing ... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=
In February, they basically dropped the old rule that you had to sign your paper over to them to get it published. Now their rule is that copyright must stay with the original author(s). To get it published, you assign to Nature a license that leaves you with ownership and the right to do essentially everything except give up ownership of your paper. You can use it freely in classroom material, make reprints, and put it up on web sites, as long as you maintain control. You can't hand it over to an employer, no matter what their rules may say.
If your employer already has a legal claim to your paper, Nature won't publish it. To get it published, your employer must first give you full rights.
And they are assigning ownership of all previously-published papers back to the authors under the same terms.
Their intent is to guarantee that any research that they publish can be made available to the public by the author(s), and that employers can't take any publication rights away from an author.
It'll be interesting to see what other tech publishers do.
Re:Changes are coming in tech publishing ... (Score:4, Informative)
Another facet of this is the growing prevalence of ties from academic institutions to commercial entities. Most of these agreements stipulate some form of IP transfer to the commercial side. The government research funding agencies have had an increasingly hard time to allow such wholesale transfer of publicly funded research results to the private sector. Many public grants now stipulate that private cosponsors cannot stop or influence the publication of research, other than maybe hold it up for a short time to review it for possible exploitation down the line (say, through patents).
All told, Nature's step is very commendable and is a great first step in a direction opposite from current trends.
Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
So here's an opportunity to send publishers a message.
Everytime you buy an O'Reily book, circle the purchase on the receipt and send it to their offices, with a short note saying something like:
"I chose this book not only because I think it will be a high-quality resource but also because of your commitment to allowing innovation by limiting the term in which you hold exclusive
Fair Use? (Score:3, Insightful)
Saving stuff from disappearing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha! (Score:2)
Yeah, but so? (Score:3, Insightful)
It *does* make me feel even more comfortable about buying O'Reilly books (though some of the stuff I read is only from Addison Wesley
Yeah, but (Score:2)
The four large keys labelled F1 through F4 are the functin keys. Period.
Re:Yeah, but (Score:2, Informative)
You can't get away with something like this on Slashdot. You have to expect some asshole like myself to bring up an irrelevent detail.
The function keys [prohosting.com] are labeled: F1 F3 F5 F7.
The even numbers are available with the SHIFT key.
Re:Yet Another Dupe (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the point (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a real company proving that shorter terms will have a very small, if any effect on them. And provide a case study that short terms are effective.
Re:That's the point (Score:2, Interesting)
I understand the gesture
Re:That's the point (Score:2)
I'd argue most movies make their profit in the first 5 years anyway.
Theater, payperview, rentals, retail sales, bargain bin doesn't take all that long.
Most business managers wouldn't accept a payback in the tens of years anyway. It should pay back FAST or VERY large, or the project gets killed.
Re:Not a great sacrafice for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Most works under copyright are out of print, because the publisher can see no economic reason to keep it in print.
Re:Not true at all.... Widen the blinders.... (Score:3, Informative)
Is not! Is so! IS NOT! IS SO!
If you're going to argue this point, you need to do better than reference a couple of the greatest SF books of all time; by their nature, they are exceptions. You're going to need numbers that give us the longevity of the typical work, not the exceptional one.
My numbers:
In 1930, 10,027 books were published. Today, 174 of those books are still in print. Source: a Red Herring article on copyright [redherring.com]
The other 9,853 books are not deemed worth the cost of keepi
Re:Not a great sacrafice for them (Score:2)
Re:In the year 2015... (Score:2)
Re:While I admire the stance... (Score:2)
Most publishers have vast holdings of works that are no longer profitable. They will neither release these works themselves, nor allow others to do so. This flies in the face of the WHOLE POINT of copyright.
The public domain is for items that are no longer profitable to print.
O'Reily's offer is still an improvement on the status quo.
Re:He cheats authors - praise him! (Score:2, Informative)