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The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
111–120 of 143 posts
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> "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" The problem is also that it's this kind of attitude that allowed Microsoft to illegally leverage its monopoly to pressure other markets, with the excuse that "Hey, you don't have to use Microsoft if you don't like their terms"…
The crucial difference here being that Microsoft had a monopoly.
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#113I think this guy is wrong. He's mixing apples and oranges when it comes to who owns what. Apple is requiring people who use its software to create an e-book to give Apple a cut of the proceeds of the Apple created e-book . The author still owns his or her content. If you want to sell your book, just don't sell the form of the book made by Apple's software. You can still sell a PDF, for example. Or you can sell your W…
> You can sell anything really.
In fact, you can even sell an iBook—just like the ones iBooks Author makes—as long as iBooks Author isn't the program you used to make it. The iBooks Author software will inevitably spawn FOSS clones, and other tools that already exist (a likely candidate is Adobe InDesign) will allow export to the same iBook format in new versions, without the same EULA qualification. You might even just author an iBook "by hand," just the way you're currently able to author eBooks—writing HTML and CSS yourself, and zipping the results. You'll be able to have your cake and eat it too, just so long as you avoid Apple's particular cake mix.
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Sorry, but where does Apple claim partial ownership? Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen that. You own a car, but you're licensed and registered by the state. You can paint it whatever color you want, but can you make an exact duplicate of that car and sell it as your own? Nope. Can you sell it without transferring registration? Nope (at least, not without alternate state paperwork). You might "own" it, but you sti…
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Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#115Is Apple claiming this restriction applies to the content of the book, or just the output of their app? Can I transcribe my book into another program and then sell it independently? What if the book is already written and published and I'm transcribing it into an iBook?
And of course, if transcribing bypasses the restriction, then simply converting the file to a different format must do the same, right?
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#116What lead us to this point in history where people whine and go on tantrums about the injustice of being given powerful free tools produced at great expense?
I think the root cause is the anti-piracy war, going on ever since the dawn of the computer age. The endgame may be an angry backlash of anti-copyright extremism gaining mainstream support. We may see a day soon when the voters demand an end to all copyright. Who knows what the end result of that would be.
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No, I do not think it would be a derivative work, at least not in the way the term is normally used. For an anology, consider MS Word. When I create a document using MS Word and save it in one of Words native formats, this file includes all sorts of information generated by MS code and includes MS specific formatting information. That does not, in any traditional meaning of the word, mean that my essay is a derivativ…
> That does not, in any traditional meaning of the word, mean that my essay is a derivative work of MS Word.
But a derivative work of the base template (normal.dot?), yes. If the template was released as NC-SA, then the resulting document is NC-SA.
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#118More of a precursor to apple centered DRM for books i would say. And as always apple using its market advantage on everything it touches.
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#119Over 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…
> you probably won't know your restrictions until you've already put in the work
Do people really start putting significant effort into projects without thinking about legal issues, distribution, etc.? (I don't consider downloading an app and creating a two page test book as 'significant effort')
Re: The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hardly buried: it's mentioned in the description of the app, it's mentioned inside the app when you "publish", it's mentioned in the help file for the app, and it appears, in boldface letters, as an "IMPORTANT NOTE", at the _beginning_ of the EULA. Also worth mentioning: the economics of K–12 textbook publishing are very different than mass-market publishing: essentially 100% of sales are volume purchases by edu…
It's still a trap. When you copy and paste your content into the iBooks software, you instantly hand over all the distribution rights, as part of the terms of an EULA of a consumer product . Sure, this is the kind of thing that the record industry does if you sign your band over to them, but this is a consumer product we're talking about. This is far beyond what a consumer should expect from such software. If Apple w…
I don't think you understand -- they're only restricting what you can do with the output of the program, not your content itself. You're free to copy/paste it into any other tool and distribute the output of that tool.