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Steal This Book? A Publisher Is Making It Easy (NY Times)

[Posted January 13, 2003 by ris]

The New York Times brings Prentice Hall's "Bruce Perens' Open Source Series" into the mainstream with this article. " Even though photocopying the entire book or making a printout of the electronic version would violate no copyright law, Prentice Hall is betting that most people will not bother, preferring to pay for the convenience of the book itself." (The NY Times is a registration required site.)

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$subject =~ s/Easy/Impossible/;

Posted Jan 18, 2003 8:01 UTC (Sat) by kbob (guest, #1770) [Link]

This article's headline is exactly backward. Instead of the open content license making it easy to steal, it makes it impossible. Under this license, copying is not stealing, it's just copying.

Oh, okay, you can still steal a physical copy. (-:

Steal This Book? A Publisher Is Making It Easy (NY Times)

Posted Jan 18, 2003 23:34 UTC (Sat) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link]

Prentice Hall has it exactly right.

Making the O'Reilly Samba book available as open soure made it possible for the Samba team to ship it with Samba, and that brought it to the attention of a very large number of people... a whole bunch of which went out and bought the printed copy, which is a lot easier to read than a bunch of 2.5 x 11 pages stapled together.

As a result I made money from a part-time project that I thought I wouldn't even break even on.

--dave (the second author) c-b