The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA • Hacker News Board

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#31

Post by Turing_Machine » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:26 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #21

nirvana wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you were careful to avoid Don't attribute to others derogatory actions as an argument technique. >This is where your analogy breaks down because this is explicitly not the case. The existence of software that does not fit my analogy does not change the fact that there are many situations where the analogy still holds. In fact, the GPL itself is an example of the analogy holding- the GPL prohibits certain kinds of co…

Ah I see where our difference in opinion originates from - you look at the book outputted by the tool as a derived work. I must admit I never conceived of this possibility, and I am still trying to digest it. I wonder how many authors who use Apple's product will realise that after two years of hard work to create a manuscript, just by hitting publish the outputted object will not wholly belong to them.

The generated book contains Apple's code. It's definitely a derivative work.

That said, a person would be foolish to write the entire book using this. Write your text and create your graphics in your editors of choice, import them into this tool to create a nice layout for the iBookstore, then import them into another tool to create a nice layout for Kindle or whatever. You might have to do that anyway -- I've yet to see a tool that will generate a nicely-formatted ebook in both MOBI (Kindle) and ePub formats. Conversion tools like Calibre work if all you care about is reading the text, but the output often looks like ass if the original eBook used anything other than the most basic formatting (that said, a lot of commercially-produced eBooks look like ass anyway, so maybe that's not such a big deal).

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#32

Post by nirvana » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:32 PM UTC

naner wrote: post #23

nirvana wrote: post #4

Over the years I've seen a large volume of creative software, often free, that is used to produce output, that requires, as part of its license, that you give the creator of the software a cut if you sell any of the things you make with it. This includes everything that is "free for non-commercial use", such as, if I recall correctly, Blender (in the past), most of the Free Fonts out there, and a lot of free software…

Being upset at this restriction is perfectly reasonable. It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system. Imagine how you would feel about similar restrictions on other production tools (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Word, Garage Band, etc.) and you would immediately see this is shitty behavior. Though I do agree with what you are saying: people have a choice not t…

>It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system.

There is no artificial lock in. They are providing a tool to produce content for their distribution system. That's its point.

The comparison to general purpose tools isn't relevant. Consider if this tool, like iAd Producer, had no ability to export in a format outside of Apple's proprietary one. Would you still be upset?

>And also Apple is leveraging their platform dominance in an uncompetitive and unfair manner and should be admonished for it.

What platform dominance is that? The same people who complain about Apple doing anything that benefits them, seem to constantly tell us that the Kindle is the dominant e-reader and that android is the dominant mobile OS.

How is providing new features for electronic books "uncompetitive and unfair"? How is providing a tool that lets you author books that use these new features "uncompetitive and unfair"?

As for competitiveness, this is the very definition of competition. They provided something better, and also provided a tool that lets people easily create content for this better solution. Isn't your real beef that this is competitive?

As for "unfair", it seems that you're the one who is being unfair. You are taking the position that they should provide you tools for free to do what you want in any way you want. You seem to presume an obligation on their part to comply with your arbitrary view that they should give you something for nothing, without restrictions.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#33

Post by nirvana » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:37 PM UTC

ugh wrote: post #22

nirvana wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually arguing the moral point. There's nothing immoral about setting the terms upon which you will trade your labor. Its the same as an employee deciding they want a higher salary or a lower one. The people who made this software give it away for free, under the understanding that it could be used by others who also give their work away fro free. What's wrong with that? But if people want to profit form it,…

Hm, that’s just not how I view the world. Of course they can, of course they should be allowed to – but that doesn’t mean I won’t judge them harshly for it. When Apple praises their education initiatives and then turns around and puts such restrictions on their authoring tool then yes, that’s some vile bullshit. They are not in it for the eduction, they are in it for themselves. They don’t have to give the tool aways…

>They are not in it for the eduction, they are in it for themselves.

These are not mutually exclusive. They're in it for the education, and they are in it for themselves.

You're in it for yourself too. I think that's the problem that trips people up. They want companies to act a certain way because it benefits them. But when the companies do something that benefits the company, somehow they think that's wrong.

I'd love it if my favorite gave me free food all the time. If my restaurant offered me free food if I'd put a gaudy sign on my car advertising the restaurant that's a choice I could make.

If I didn't like the sign and didn't take their offer, I wouldn't then say "well that's just wrong of them to offer me that!"

> I would be perfectly happy with Apple selling it.

I think when it comes to software, people are so used to getting things for free, that when they see something encumbered by a restriction they think that this is somehow immoral.

Its not, its just a different way of selling the software. Just like the restaurant, rather than selling me food for money, selling me food in exchange for advertising.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#34

Post by nirvana » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:42 PM UTC

thetrendycyborg wrote: post #27

nirvana wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We may be not entitled to demand people to produce things for our benefit, but we're certainly entitled to demand the freedom to do what we want with already produced things. The only difference between those two example is temporal. I don't think that difference makes a difference. Do you have the right to demand that people who have already produced some software, give it away for free and never be allowed to char…

They can charge for the software. What he's talking about is if you produce a thing, no matter how you produce it, you have the right to determine what you want to do with that product. No one can say this tool must be used in this way so we make money. If they need to make money off the tool, they should be charging for it in some way.

>What he's talking about is if you produce a thing, no matter how you produce it, you have the right to determine what you want to do with that product.

The thing produced here is a derivative work that contains Apple created code and content.

Taking your words and changing the context produces this:

"if you produce a [some software], no matter how you produce it, [or who elses code you include with it.] you have the right to determine what [license agreement you use]."

See how that doesn't work?

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#35

Post by eridius » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:42 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #5

nirvana wrote: post #4

Over the years I've seen a large volume of creative software, often free, that is used to produce output, that requires, as part of its license, that you give the creator of the software a cut if you sell any of the things you make with it. This includes everything that is "free for non-commercial use", such as, if I recall correctly, Blender (in the past), most of the Free Fonts out there, and a lot of free software…

The exact analogy in FSF terms which you were careful to avoid is - An executable created by a GPL compiler will have to be GPL licensed. This is where your analogy breaks down because this is explicitly not the case.

If I remember correctly, the GPLv3 license prohibits creating DRM'd content. Or more insidiously, a GPLv3-licensed compiler (e.g. recent GCC) cannot be used to produce an executable that contains DRM code without being in violation of the license, despite the fact that the executable itself is not covered under the GPL.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not willing to wade into the sea of legalese that is the GPLv3 right now just to verify this.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#36

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:45 PM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #32

naner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being upset at this restriction is perfectly reasonable. It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system. Imagine how you would feel about similar restrictions on other production tools (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Word, Garage Band, etc.) and you would immediately see this is shitty behavior. Though I do agree with what you are saying: people have a choice not t…

>It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system. There is no artificial lock in. They are providing a tool to produce content for their distribution system. That's its point. The comparison to general purpose tools isn't relevant. Consider if this tool, like iAd Producer, had no ability to export in a format outside of Apple's proprietary one. Would you still…

The lock-in would be complete if they change iBooks to only display books that have been published with their variant of epub classes. They don't do this, so would have to agree that you can produce your book any way you want then make it available.

I believe the original author's pain is around the paucity of good EPUB publishing tools, and to have one appear with these restrictions makes them sad. It would have been nice if Apple had said, "If you buy a commercial license to this software for $X we won't constrain your ability to sell the books produced." Then at least there would be a way to use to the tool to produce books that would be salable at both Apple and Amazon's shops.

Clearly Apple sees this as a way to build a library of 'exclusive' content in iBooks and mute the Kindle threat. For me at least that shows me just how threatening the Kindle Fire is to their model.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#37

Post by phillmv » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:52 PM UTC

ryanwhitney wrote: post #16

I'm not seeing why this is so unreasonable, if someone could fill me in. The program is for creating iBooks, not eBooks, to be sold through their iBookstore. I'm seeing these more as apps than something like .ePub files or .PDFs. Unlike apps though, which require an developer license to load yourself, Author gives anyone the ability to run these books on your iPad. It also gives anyone the ability to distribute an iB…

The icky feeling comes from the hypothetical transitivity of such an agreement. It seems like a great way to bootstrap a pseudo-feudal obligation system.

What if everything you made with the OS was similarly hindered? Launch an auto update that effectively bricks your device unless you agree to the new EULA, blah blah nightmare scenario here.

Less hyperbolically, it's like the first concrete step into killing the freedom to read. My biggest concern with iBooks is whether they have remote wipe and whether you can launch books sans DRM.

It's going to be awkward when the PATRIOTSOPA Act of 2022 remote deletes all of my chemistry textbooks because terrorists can learn about exothermic reactions or revises all of the biology textbooks because evolution has been deemed illegal.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#38

Post by drcube » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:56 PM UTC

When is Microsoft going to get the bright idea to incorporate everything anybody writes in Word or Visual Studio into their own IP portfolio? Or Adobe appropriates the copyright of any image edited with Photoshop? Here's to the crazy ones.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#39

Post by pmr_ » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 10:59 PM UTC

I recently thought a lot about the relationship between user input and program output and what implications the transformations performed by the program have on the copyright. Consider a heavy optimizing compiler: The program you feed into it will often be entirely different in terms of execution, but not result, from the user input. Some optimizations might even hide bugs that the original program might have had. At what point would it be justified to consider the program (or the creator thereof) to have some implied copyright on the produced output. Do we need to consider the smartness of the applied algorithms? Is it necessary for a program to be considered a true AI to hold the copyright to something?

Anyway, I don't see how that applies to a pretty printer for books. A mere tool is only that. I don't see why it should restrict my ability to commercialize my product. If someone were to suggest that the producers of pens, paper or canvas should have a say in how artists are to sell their works people would just laugh at him.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#40

Post by manmal » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:00 PM UTC

I say, let the consumers (=authors) decide - evolution happens through disruption, and this surely is a disruption. If the authors fall for it, well, they are ok with the consequences. If the thing really takes off and public really cares and puts pressure on them, they will loosen the EULA, I'm sure.