31–40 of 57 posts
Kudos to Mark Pilgrim for believing in GPL's philosophy! Love DIP.
This is what free software / free licenses needs, people who parade and exemplify it rather than compare it to non-free licenses or even hate on and fight against non-free software, by force.
You know, I love this. Simply because I like when I purchase classics (not covered by copyright any longer) that I have the ability to choose the book based on criteria I cannot usually factor in. I can opt for quality paper, for a nice and well-spaced font, for good-binding, for a nicer jacket, for a specific translation. I like that there is the potential that I could purchase this book and be able to choose such t…
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This was an issue recently with the Google Book Search deal. Even though the books were out of copyright or orphaned, Google owned the copyright to the scans, and would only give a non-transferable license back to the universities.
Scanning a public domain work doesn't give you copyright over it. See Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
It's harder to google for that term than many other copyright terms, but here it is from the horse's mouth: http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm
Google does have a copyright on the collection as a whole, even as they do not gain any extra rights on the underlying public domain material. It's sort of weird, but it does make sense.
I don’t know where that leaves you as a business. I suspect this leaves Apress at the "Require all further authors to contractually promise us, in writing, that they are assigning Apress the exclusive right to publish/distribute the content and have not written any legal landmines which contradict this clause into the sections we routinely don't read".
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I don't entirely understand his explanation though. All I understand is that Mark approves of what happened. I do not understand why it is a good thing and why he wants the world to work like this. He didn't explain that. The whole logic of what and how you are allowed to charge for in the free software/content world seems completely arbitrary to me, even though I have read so much about it.
I'm not a lawyer, but my layman's understanding is something like this: * If you wrote/created/designed it, you get to pick the license. You can give it to some people under the GPL, you can give it to other people under the BSD license, you can negotiate all kinds of crazy licenses for arbitrary recompense you dream up - it's up to you. * If you received a copy of some GPL'd code, freely or in exchange for money, yo…
You're pretty much spot on. You don't just get the right to redistribute, though, you also get the right to modify. If you do modify, and distribute your modifications, you're obligated to release them under the GPL as well (this is what FUDers always cry 'viral' over).
I have several little writing projects that I distribute, but I chose the Creative Commons 'no commercial use, no derivatives' license because that was what I felt good with.
People who create stuff have the right to choose the license.
So do Apress pay royalties to Mark currently, on a per unit sold basis? If these new people can publish under the GFDL then presumably Apress can (are?) as well.
I assume Apress is constrained by their contract with Mark.
Otherwise it's hard to see how they couldn't wiggle out of paying royalties?
I was curious if the printed book included mention of the GNU license so I "searched inside" on Amazon. These two paragraphs are pretty odd sitting next to each other: http://timfreeman.org/copyright_dip.png