Hey, this guy taught me Operating Systems! He was a great lecturer despite his own preference for book learning :-)
The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
51–60 of 87 posts
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#52Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
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Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most basic incentive is for the fun of it. There are plenty of people who publish stuff without hoping to get directly compensated for it. Even otherwise, ideas have a nasty habit of breaking free from the first authors, specially without laws to prevent such. Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. Authors are basically an afterthought. In regards to countries with weaker copyright enfo…
> Also, copyright isn't about compensating authors, but publishers. That depends on the country. There are moral rights [0] which are usually non-transferable from the authors. That’s especially the case in the European tradition of copyright: “ In most of Europe, it is not possible for authors to assign or even broadly waive their moral rights. This follows a tradition in European copyright itself, which is regarded…
Interesting for a later search, but moral rights aren't about compensation though:
> The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. [...] Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
Also from [0]
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#54There are existing free textbook publishing organizations. From a satisfied consumer point of view: https://openintro.org/ and https://openstax.org/.
> I first came into contact with this high-cost/low-quality problem as a student
The challenge with this perspective is that it focuses on monetary cost (what I have to pay to take a class) instead of positioning knowledge transmission repositories within a value framework.
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.
The media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.
They know full and well they're unlikely to ever make money on there art so the protections such as they are aren't material. In fact their copyrights are often roundly ignored online with copies spreading freely a thing that's success for most of the people posting things for free!
If the justification for copyright is supposed to be that it and the promise of control of their creations is the encouragement to create people creating for free is a direct contradiction of that thesis. The fact they're automatically given copyright doesn't mean they're creating it because they have that theoretical control.
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#56“Everything except what I do should be free to me.” Remember that you can make your own textbook (and accompanying materials) using your own money and time whenever you want!
Right. Just use the LLM to generate it for you /s
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#57Textbooks being expensive has nothing to do with the textbook. The textbook as an actual object of learning is irrelevant; a textbook is just a fee added on to the cost of the class that happens to come with a physical pile of bound paper that may or may not be useful. It's unfortunately a rather regressive fee that also generates a lot of landfill waste.
There's little to be said about the way the economics of higher education have gone in the past few decades that's been positive for either students or educators, and this is just another symptom of it. As someone who's live in a college town for most of his life, it's rather depressing to watch the n-order effects.
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#58There need to be more efforts at more books which take advantage of technology in interesting ways and which are freely distributable for the public good.
Two notable efforts:
- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
- https://www.motionmountain.net/
as well as arguably the influential: https://howtothink.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
of course, in addition to crowd-sourced efforts at more traditional media:
as well as an entire category of Computer Science texts/programs published as books:
- http://literateprogramming.com/
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#59Copyright stifles creative output. I believe that if we got rid of copyright (not just for textbooks), the quality and quantity of published work will increase.
Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated? Countries with weak copyright enforcement don’t tend to have better output than the US (I think most would argue it’s worse). I do agree the term is too long, I would support something in the range of 5-20 years.
> Why would people author published works if they won’t get compensated?
Do you think no one was publishing anything before the year 1500?
I mean, your question is basically right. People won't do things if they won't get compensated. But copyright isn't even a large portion of the compensation people get from authoring works.
Re: The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an odd question to ask given the history of free media like flash games, youtube videos, deviant art/pixiv/etc, and fan fiction. Getting paid, especially enough that one can make a living off of it, for your creative work is an exception not the rule way more people create it for no money than ever make any money at all much less a living.
The media you cite are still copyrighted, meaning that it’s illegal for other people to distribute them or make money of it without a corresponding license. If that weren’t the case, creators might be more reluctant.
The Fortress of Doors blog had a good article on the history of flash game development. That article included an overview of the process, in which an explicitly-considered step was "after you upload your .swf file to the site that paid you to display their logo, every other site rips off the file and republishes it themselves".
That's why what the first site paid for was having their logo displayed in your game.