The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA • Hacker News Board

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#41

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

nirvana wrote: post #20

ugh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the legal side. It’s still possible to be disgusted by this for purely moral reasons. Apple is pulling some vile bullshit here and they shouldn’t.

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,…

> There's nothing immoral about setting the terms upon which you will trade your labor.

True, but there is something immoral about hidden fees.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#42

Post by lelele » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:04 PM UTC

It's reasonable to ask for a cut on your software output, if the author is giving it out for free. While should they give out their work for free to people who are going to make money out of it?

Actually, asking for a cut could become a standard option for selling software where you would offer at customer's choice:

- GPL;

- commercial license, paid upfront;

- commercial license, paid by royalties.

That way, people who don't agree to the GPL, but still think your commercial license is too expensive compared to their expected earnings would have a further option: no gain, no pain.

As a side note, one of the reasons I prefer software which comes with standard licenses (GPL, BSD, etc.) is that I know what those licenses say, and I can click on "I agree" without worrying about the fine print. If the license text differs in some way from its template, authors are explicit about that.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#43

Post by MatthewPhillips » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:04 PM UTC

nirvana wrote: post #26

cek wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely disagree with 'nirvana' here. He/she is just wrong. Apple is going far above and behind reasonable practices with this EULA. But I did NOT downvote him/her on HN and I'm sad to see that his/her post has been downvoted. That's just wrong. If you don't agree say way, don't downvote.

Its been interesting to watch the score jump up and down as I respond to comments. I agree with you about the down votes. I've up voted several responses today from people who disagreed with me (particularly where they made a good point or pointed out an error of fact I made, but where it didn't seem appropriate to respond further since their statements stood on their own.) I think part of the reaction is that people…

> If this product only working in a proprietary format would cause people to not complain--- because obviously the product was built to support the iBookStore-- then really the outrage is that you can use the product for other uses as well, Right?

I think that's the point. You can't use it for other purposes. This is classic bait-and-switch. It has all of the appearances of a content-creation tool like people have used for decades, but it is not.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#44

Post by cjensen » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:10 PM UTC

In the Good Old Days, you had to pay a royalty to your compiler vendor when you sold a copy of your own program.

So what Apple is doing is legal and has precedent. But it's stupid so I hope and expect that they will fix this.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#45

Post by statictype » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:14 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…

Apple doesn't own the Apps that you create or claim partial ownership of it. Your code and it's output belongs to you. The developer license is offensive in it's own way but that's a different issue than what's happening here with iBooks

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#46

Post by mkr-hn » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:14 PM UTC

Someone with legal expertise should go over this looking for something that's less obviously harmful. I can't imagine Apple's legal team not realizing this would come out.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#47

Post by statictype » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:16 PM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #31

dman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a derived work in the same way that linking to stdlib from your program makes it a derived work. Which is to say, no, it's not reasonable to call books you wrote with this tool to be considered a derived work.

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#48

Post by Firebrand » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:17 PM UTC

Isn't this sort of the same thing Amazon requires for their Kindle Direct Publishing program?

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#49

Post by Volpe » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:22 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #41

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,…

> There's nothing immoral about setting the terms upon which you will trade your labor. True, but there is something immoral about hidden fees.

Where is the hidden fee?

Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA

#50

Post by statictype » Thu, Jan 19, 2012, 11:23 PM UTC

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…

Your entire post can basically be tl;dr'd as "It's Apple's product so they can do anything they want and therefore there is no reasonable discussion to be had about whether or not it makes sense or is offensive or the right thing to do"

There are real issues with gpl code that makes other derived works also gpl and there are reasonable discussions to be had about it besides "the person who created it can do whatever he wants. End of story". Same thing applies here.