O'Reilly First to Adopt Founders' Copyright [LWN.net]

From:		Sara Winge <sara@oreilly.com>
To:		lwn@lwn.net
Subject:		O'Reilly First to Adopt Founders' Copyright
Date:		Wed, 23 Apr 2003 13:25:26 -0700 (PDT)

For Immediate Release
April 23, 2003
For more information, contact:
Sara Winge (707) 827-7109 or sara@oreilly.com 

O'Reilly is First to Adopt Founders' Copyright:
Publisher Restores Balance to Copyright with New Legal Option from
Creative Commons

Santa Clara, CA--Technology publisher O'Reilly & Associates has
launched the latest of its initiatives to shake up the intellectual
property establishment. At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
today, founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly announced his company's commitment
to applying the Founders' Copyright to O'Reilly books.

Developed by Creative Commons, the Founders' Copyright is a legal
option that allows copyright holders to voluntarily release their works
to the public after the period envisioned in the original 1790 US
copyright law--14 years, with the option of one 14-year extension.
O'Reilly will be releasing its books under the Creative Commons
Attribution license, which permits others to copy and distribute work
as long as they give the original author and publisher credit.

"Copyright law is a foundation of my business," said O'Reilly. "But the
original copyright balance has been distorted to tip heavily in favor
of creators and publishers. The 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act
increased the copyright term to the author's life plus seventy years,
yet only a few works are still in active use over that length of time.
This copyright extension, enacted to protect a small number of very
valuable works, has had the unintended consequence of depriving the
public of access to a far greater number of other works."

"As a publisher, I want to profit fairly from my work, but also nourish
the intellectual commons. It's in my best interest to ensure that the
public domain continues to be a deep well from which we all can draw.
By adopting the Founders' Copyright, my company can protect our
intellectual property for a reasonable term, and then give it back to
the public."

Although in most cases it owns the rights to the books it has
published, O'Reilly will release books under the Founders' Copyright
only with the author's permission. The company is in the process of
soliciting that permission, and 80% of the authors who have responded
to date have agreed to honor the Founders' Copyright. O'Reilly is also
applying the Creative Commons Attribution license to hundreds of
out-of-print books, pending author approval.

O'Reilly has been exploring alternative forms of copyright and content
licensing since the January, 1995 release of the "Linux Network
Administrator's Guide." Author Olaf Kirch posted the first version of
the book online in September 1993, and when O'Reilly offered to publish
a print version, Kirch wanted to ensure that the content of the book
was still freely available, as Linux was. O'Reilly agreed, publishing
the book under the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation
License, and contributing its extensive edits back into the online
version. In his preface to the print book, Kirsch noted, "In my view,
the great service O'Reilly is doing to the Linux community (apart from
the book becoming readily available at your local bookstore) is that it
may help Linux be recognized as something to be taken seriously."

O'Reilly has since released a number of books under various open source
licenses, either because the author requested it or because the book's
sales didn't warrant keeping it in print, but the content was very
useful to a particular group of people. A complete list of available
titles is at http://www.oreilly.com/openbook. As they implement the
Founders' Copyright, O'Reilly will continue to make more titles
available online under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

More about the Founders' Copyright:
http://www.creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright

A list of the O'Reilly titles to be released under the Founders'
Copyright:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/oreilly

A description of the Creative Commons Attribution license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0

About O'Reilly 
O'Reilly & Associates is the premier information source for
leading-edge computer technologies. The company's books, conferences,
and web sites bring to light the knowledge of technology innovators.
O'Reilly books, known for the animals on their covers, occupy a
treasured place on the shelves of the developers building the next
generation of software. O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha
geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the
revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to
XML, open source, .NET, Java, and web services, O'Reilly puts
technologies on the map. For more information: http://www.oreilly.com

# # #

O'Reilly is a registered trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All
other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

(Log in to post comments)

14 years?

Posted Apr 24, 2003 22:29 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

We might. Every industry has fast and slow times. Computer industry is no exception. Futurists of the 1950s predicted that we would have flying card by now, but couldn't predict the Internet. That's because aviation was a hot topic back then. Today, making a aircraft 20% faster is a big deal, but nobody will invest billions into making a computer that is 20% faster than what we have now.

I'm sure that Java will be around in 2017, and so will DNS (although the underlying protocols may change). A lot of free software we are running today will be around. Perhaps recompiled for new processors, perhaps with stronger security embedded into the hardware and the programming language. But it will be there, and specialists will need books about that software.

14 years?

Posted Apr 25, 2003 0:26 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

How about a 14-year-old version of "sed & awk" (first edition, not on the list) in 2004 or a 14-year-old version of the X books in 2006? How about a 14-year-old version of the "make" book in 2005? The second edition of K&R (not O'Reilly) turned 14 in 2002; if it were public domain, a sourceforge project probably would have updated it for C99 by now.

Of course, the 28-year option probably actually is too long for useful documentation.

Useful sections

Posted May 1, 2003 5:25 UTC (Thu) by lovelace (guest, #278) [Link]

If we're still using regular expressions in 14 years (well, 14 years after the book was
published), the sed & awk book will be useful. I still use it as my reference for regular
expressions. I can imagine other books might have similar useful sections.

14 years?

Posted Apr 25, 2003 16:19 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

14 years sound pretty good to me.

C is 34 years old.
Unix is 32 years old.
GNU is 19 years old.
"old" technology is pretty cool really.

Think of how great it would be if they had adopted this policy 14 years ago?
Pretty good yeh? well that's how good it's going to be for the next generation, they'll have a buch of good old books that can be read and updated. (plus, their openbooks section has one or two good books.)

Ciaran O'Riordan