Anyone has actually read the thing and can make a little "lessons learned" summary?
Peter Thiel’s startup class notes in PDF
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: Peter Thiel’s startup class notes in PDF
#32This is awesome. But, I hope Blake is fine with this. I did the same thing earlier, scraped the posts and created a epub. He immediately sent me an email: Please remove the ePub version of my notes that you put on Github. Peter Thiel, Clarium, and I are still figuring out what to do with the content. Very likely we will be publishing something ourselves. As you do not own the content and did not ask for permission, p…
I sent the blog posts, one by one, to the kindle using Readability.
Re: Peter Thiel’s startup class notes in PDF
#33How does this not violate the No Derivatives portion of the content license?
Given that this is licensed Creative Commons under Attribution, Non-Commercial, and No Derivative Works, -- and notwithstanding a general desire to respect the authors wishes ( http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22922727433/read-share-p... ) -- it becomes a question as to whether it is a truly derivative work. Since the meat-and-potatoes of the work is entirely textual, and faithfully reproduced, you could argue tha…
Can you iterate on this a bit more.
Based on this I am actually a bit unsure if blake is not miss-interpreting BY-NC-ND at all.
E.g. http://mollykleinman.com/2008/10/20/cc-howto-no-derivatives/ interpretes the legal text like this: "The key words here are “recast, transformed, or adapted.” A derivative work involves enough creativity and originality that it constitutes a new copyrightable work. Simply converting a work from one medium to another — from print to digital, or CD to MP3 — does not produce a derivative work."
Not that it matters - they asked people not to create epubs/pdfs so i removed mine just to respect the wish.
I just want to learn for future issues.
Re: Peter Thiel’s startup class notes in PDF
#34I've turned Blake's blog posts into an audio collection simply using Apple's built in Text to Speech. It makes for a remarkably listenable series.
Re: Peter Thiel’s startup class notes in PDF
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given that this is licensed Creative Commons under Attribution, Non-Commercial, and No Derivative Works, -- and notwithstanding a general desire to respect the authors wishes ( http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/22922727433/read-share-p... ) -- it becomes a question as to whether it is a truly derivative work. Since the meat-and-potatoes of the work is entirely textual, and faithfully reproduced, you could argue tha…
Can you iterate on this a bit more. Based on this I am actually a bit unsure if blake is not miss-interpreting BY-NC-ND at all. E.g. http://mollykleinman.com/2008/10/20/cc-howto-no-derivatives/ interpretes the legal text like this: "The key words here are “recast, transformed, or adapted.” A derivative work involves enough creativity and originality that it constitutes a new copyrightable work. Simply converting a wo…
That's a great link. I think it matches my interpretation of the No Derivatives provision.
I think you are very much in the free and clear from the standpoint of the license. The language of the CC license does say that you are free to reproduce it and include it in collections. It even suggests that the media in question is not important: "rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised". There's no point in making reference to "hereafter devised" media if they medium is assume to be fixed at the time of license.
Further, "[the] rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats" which clearly gives you the right to change mediums as long as we do not violate the clause on adaptations.
The adaptation clause, of course, it up for some interpretation. However, the definition of a derivative work under US Copyright law is likely what was envisioned. If it was not, it would have probably been a huge blunder to call this the "No Derivatives" license. The standard test here seems to be whether the transformation had any significant creative input, and since you conversion was almost purely mechanical, I would argue that it was not significant enough to be considered a derivative.
One thing you did forget to do was to include the CC license itself.
Disclaimer: IANAL (or Copyright Scholar). YMMV.