[DMCA-Activists] anyone up for a bowl of Pho?

[John Parres]

Anyone 
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> Today's Topics:
> 
>    1. Free Books (Seth Johnson)
>    2. Re: [C-Fit_Community] Stallman: Can You Trust Your Computer? (iriXx)
>    3. Legal History on "Natural" vs. Statutory Exclusive Rights (Seth
> Johnson)
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> --__--__--
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 09:02:06 -0400
> From: Seth Johnson <address@hidden>
> Organization: Real Measures
> To: address@hidden,
>       address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden
> Subject: [DMCA-Activists] Free Books
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> 
> 
> (Forwarded from TransHumanTech list.  Some interesting
> angles here.  -- Seth)
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 14:27:44 +0200 (CEST)
> From: Eugen Leitl <address@hidden>
> To: <address@hidden>
> 
> 
> > http://www.lightandmatter.com/article/sneaky.html
> 
> Free Books: A Sneaky Success
> 
> by Ben Crowell
> 
> 
> At the height of the dot-com bubble, twenty-somethings with
> goatees were  telling us that e-books were the wave of the
> future. Those e-books they  had in mind were like
> proprietary software: they weren't free  (-as-in-anything),
> they only worked on proprietary hardware, and they came 
> with shrinkwrap licenses and digital rights management. They
> failed. The  successful model that's sneaking under the
> radar is the copylefted book.
> 
> This article is copyright 2002 by Benjamin Crowell, and is
> open-content  licensed under the GFDL 1.1 license
> 
> Two years ago, the idea of a free book --- a book whose
> author had  intentionally made it free on the internet ---
> was largely unknown and  untested.[1] Looming on the horizon
> instead, with every prospect of  success, were the
> "anti-books:" electronic books encumbered with odious 
> licensing terms and restrictive digital rights management
> technology.[2]  You wouldn't be able to loan such a book to
> a friend, public libraries  couldn't acquire it, and if you
> stopped paying your rental fee, it would  expire and become
> unreadable!
> 
> What the marketroids predicted didn't come true. The
> anti-book has been an  abject failure. What seems to be
> succeeding instead is the copylefted  book. My own online
> catalog, The Assayer,[3] currently lists 385 books  that are
> free as in beer (i.e., can be read without paying money),
> of  which 50 are free as in speech (come with copyleft
> licenses, and are  guaranteed to stay free forever). My list
> is based only on random  websurfing done by me and other
> users of my web site, so the true number  of free books is
> certainly much greater than this. What's perhaps more 
> significant than the quantity of books on the list is their
> quality: at  least two of them[4],[5] seem to be the
> standard textbooks in their field  today.
> 
> Displacing Unfree Books
> 
> So at least in some cases, free books have displaced unfree
> ones in the  marketplace. This is a remarkable achievement!
> For all the open-source  software movement's successes, I'm
> not aware of any case in which an  entrenched proprietary
> program was pushed out of first place in the market  by
> open-source software. We should sit up and pay attention to
> what this  tells us about the future of the free information
> movement. How did it  happen, and why has it happened with
> books but not with software?
> 
> One difference between books and software is that unlike
> books, software  is easy to emulate and easy to add features
> to. An innovation like the  graphical user unterface can be
> embraced and extended by proprietary  software companies
> like Apple and Microsoft, and the winner in the  marketplace
> will be whoever has the best marketing. Conversely, an 
> open-source project like OpenOffice.org can try to compete
> with an  entrenched proprietary program like MS Office, but
> will always have to  play catch-up when Microsoft adds a new
> feature that one user out of a  thousand comes to consider
> indispensible. None of this happens with books.  Microsoft
> can't just say, "Romeo and Juliet was a big success for 
> Shakespeare, so we'll write something similar."
> 
> Books also have no barrier to entry. Most people think
> computers are scary  and confusing. They're willing to keep
> paying for new versions of Word  because they don't want to
> have to learn a different word processor, and  they're
> worried about compatibility. Books, however, are easy to
> use, and  most computer users know how to use an electronic
> book that is in the  ubiquitous (and nonproprietary) Adobe
> Acrobat format. Dead Trees
> 
> Readers want their books on paper, and this is another
> advantage that  authors of free books enjoy and open-source
> programmers don't. A printed  book is something you can
> sell. An open-source software vendor like  Mandrake can have
> a tough time convincing users to pay for something they 
> could get for free. Book publishers like Baen and O'Reilly,
> however, have  found that they can increase sales of their
> printed books by giving away  the digital versions for free.
> This has also been my own experience with  my self-published
> physics textbooks. It's cheap marketing: readers can  browse
> the digital book to see if it's something they want, and if
> they  like it, they're willing to pay for the convenience of
> a printed copy.
> 
> By the way, here's another place where the dot-bombers
> goofed. Remember a  few years ago when they were predicting
> that print-on-demand publishing  would be the wave of the
> future? You were supposed to be able to go to  your local
> Borders or Barnes and Noble, ask for an obscure book on 
> medieval Bulgaria, and have it printed and bound while you
> sipped a $5  cappucino. It didn't happen, probably in part
> because the technology was  unwieldy and in part because the
> store's employees would have had to show  an unusual level
> of craftsmanship and attention to detail considering  their
> pay and their already busy workloads. The Cathedral, Not the
> Bazaar
> 
> Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar[6] has had a big
> effect on how  hackers think about open-source software.
> (And by the way, this is another  example of a book that is
> free in digital form, and can also be bought in  print.)
> Raymond described a model of collaborative software
> development in  which a large, geographically dispersed
> group of programmers worked  together in a seemingly chaotic
> way. This bazaar model was to be  contrasted with the
> cathedral model, in which everything is done according  to a
> detailed, preexisting plan.
> 
> The bazaar model seems to have been almost a complete
> failure in the world  of free books, although not for want
> of trying. Tellingly, The Cathedral  and the Bazaar was
> itself written cathedral-style by Raymond. He has also 
> started a bazaar-style book project, The Art of Unix
> Programming[7], which  appears to be languishing. I can only
> think of one high-quality  bazaar-model free book, a
> textbook in which each author wrote one  chapter.[4]
> 
> The failure of the bazaar model with free books might not
> seem surprising,  since to most people it sounds like the
> silly party game where each person  takes a turn adding more
> onto a story. We normally assume that an author  has a
> unique voice, and that authorship can't be delegated.
> However, quite  a high percentage of the world's free books
> seem to be software  documentation, which in principle
> should be amenable to a decentralized  approach. The GFDL
> copyleft license for books is clearly aimed at such 
> projects, and requires, for example, that the book be
> maintained in a form  that can be edited with free software,
> so that it will never become a pig  in a poke if the
> original author loses interest or goes incommunicado.  Group
> authorship, however, just doesn't seem to have caught on,
> even in  software documentation. Maybe the explanation is
> that in software  projects, the number of programmers
> interested in writing documentation  averages to less than
> one. However, that wouldn't explain the failure of  the
> Nupedia open-content encyclopedia project, which would seem
> to have  been ideally suited for group authorship. My own
> experience attempting to  contribute an article to Nupedia
> suggests a simpler theory: people make  free information
> because it's fun, and group authorship is not fun.
> 
> Free Forever, or Just For Now?
> 
> Eric Raymond's name is closely associated with the bazaar
> model, while  Richard Stallman's evokes the cathedral, as
> demonstrated most dramatically  by the contrast between
> Stallman's HURD kernel project and the Linux  kernel. There
> is another way in which Stallman's unique point of view has 
> 
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