[kwlug disc.] Linux Magazine
Insurance Squared Inc.
gcooke at insurancesquared.com
Tue Mar 20 06:59:03 EST 2007
I'd be interested in that course if you manage to dig up the details.
Cedric Puddy wrote:
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> Comments inline...
>
> On 19-Mar-07, at 1:53 PM, Insurance Squared Inc. wrote:
>
>> Cedric, that's an interesting concept, one that I've actually chewed
>> over myself without a good resolution. If a work is out of copyright
>> due to it's age, you can duplicate/distribute the work. But you're
>> saying that this secondary distribution can't then be copied directly?
>
> Exactly. The key concept use to keep copyright straight in my head is
> this "It's all about the **expression** of the idea/data". This is
> why the example I gave of the University Courseware situation is so
> nice an illustration. The re-assembly & re-creation of the work is a
> protectable act, since it creates a new instance (expression) of the
> work, and thus each instance gets a fresh time frame of protection.
>
> Where it gets a little bit more interesting for me is things like
> animated characters - the *idea* of having a story line with a bird
> and a cat duking it out is just that -- an idea that *anyone* can
> use. What you can't do is draw something that looks *just like"
> Tweety-Bird, even though you made the drawing yourself, it is a fresh
> instance, etc. The reason, as best I can figure, is that the means of
> making the copy doesn't matter. You can make the copy with a camera,
> photocopier, or a pen, but if it is essentially an exact copy, it
> invokes copyright concerns.
>
> That's why just sitting down with a pen, and writing out a copy of
> Harry Potter in long-hand is still a violation of copyright, despite
> the fact that it looks quite different, and is a lot of work -- it's
> still fundamentally an exact copy. (You might get off if your
> handwriting is so bad that only you can read it...). It's when you
> start making *creative* changes to a pre-existing work that you can
> gain the right to re-use a work that is protected (this is not always
> easy, especially if you want to try this work *owned by* someone who
> has money & lawyers - note that much of the copyright material we
> consume in the mainstream these days is owned by people *who did not
> actually create the work in question*. FLOSS Software, self-produced
> Youtube videos, Lulu.com books, is a *radical* change in the copyright
> landscape, no question!)
>
> The thing that makes Google Books so interesting is their position
> that their scanning the books is the creation of a new original work -
> -- in their database, no-where is the contiguous book represented -
> it's represented as part of a databased slurry of all the other books,
> and can be reassembled in bits and pieces by the search software, so
> as to give the user snippits of text, and information about what text
> is in which book. Google says that their databaseed representation of
> that information is anything but a literal copy, and is in fact almost
> completely transformative.
> (In copyright, you can even use a whole copyrighted work, if your new
> work is deemed to be sufficiently transformative/original. The idea
> is that a judge can come up with a percentage by which the original
> and the new work differ -- As best I can tell, Google is humbly
> suggesting that the Judge come up with a number, say, around ... oh...
> 100% different. We'll see... :)
>
> My copyright legal-beagle is Steph (some of you may have met her at
> meetings, etc) -- she used to do copyright clearances, and has more
> formal background in it than I, though we both follow developments in
> copyright as closely as time allows. There is a ~$50 course in
> Canadian copyright that is generally available as well, which I could
> find details on if someone on list was interested in a guided, paid,
> tour through the ins-and-outs of the Act.
>
>> You'll have noticed some threads here recently by me about scanning.
>> I buy up antique books on various topics that are out of copyright.
>
> Very cool. Mad props from me. :)
>
>> I scan them and make them available online. While the intent is to
>> allow (almost) everyone unfettered access to them I suspect at some
>> point some nefarious scraper sites will scrape all my hard work, and
>> republish it with advertising (hard work being defined as many, many
>> hours scanning books in, buying scanners, ocr software, hand building
>> web pages of tables of contents, etc).
>
> Completely agreed. And that's where your right to protect all that
> hard work with copyright because really valuable -- you can absolutely
> apply a Creative Commons license of your choice, the GPL, etc, to the
> version that you make publicly available. You can license a copy to
> Project Gutenberg on terms amiable to their use. You can cut a
> license to a for-profit use, should such a thing come your way.
>
> I Am Not A Lawyer, of course, and since you're going to invest 1000's
> of hours of blood & sweat into this thing, it might be worth
> cross-checking with a real Lawyer. (the "3 hours in the library can
> frequently save 3 months in the lab" sort of thinking :)
>
> I've got some materials that may well be of interest for scanning --
> we can talk off list if you want to talk about that.
>
> All the Best,
>
> -Cedric
>
>> Cedric Puddy wrote:
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>>> My understanding of the GPL is that individual distros may well free
>>> and clear, but that simply ripping the CD as whole might in some
>>> small, but valid, way violate LM's copyright (let's say, for
>>> example, that they wrote a README and put it in the root of the
>>> disk, in which they discussed the pros-and-cons of the various
>>> distros).
>>>
>>> They would be within their rights (though, perhaps arguably not
>>> their senses) to say "All Rights Reserved" with respect to that bit,
>>> and bitwise copying the whole CD would then be blocked.
>>>
>>> If there is no value-add whatsoever, and it's just 11 directories
>>> with 11 different GPL'd/FLOSS distros in vanilla form, then it is
>>> still possible that a court might consider the bundling together of
>>> the various materials to be sufficient to form a copyrightable
>>> expression. Certainly in the world of books, the simple act of
>>> collection, flowing it through a layout program and hitting "Print"
>>> is enough to constitute a fully projectable expression of a work.
>>>
>>> For an analogy, consider the phone book -- the content is explicitly
>>> *not* covered by copyright. However, the **expression** of that
>>> content (the size and shape of the book, the layout, font, etc,)
>>> is. The idea is that if you take non-copyright material, do a
>>> butt-load-o-work, and come up with a novel expression, more useful
>>> expression, etc, then you still get to protect it from willy-nilly
>>> copying. (Same thing with Westlaw -- the case texts are public
>>> domain, but the compensation for a company to visit every court in
>>> the country, get copies, digitize them all, index them, etc, is that
>>> they get to claim copyright to their particular publications, and
>>> charge for access.)
>>>
>>> In a University setting, imagine you are an English Prof, and you
>>> want to use a snippit of Shakespeare in your official courseware.
>>> Under Cancopy, the courseware people have to go a find the exact
>>> book you took that snippit from, and if that *particular* source is
>>> still under copyright, then tada - royalties due in full to the
>>> publisher. If you were an experienced Prof or cared for the poor
>>> beaten pocketbooks of your students, you would probably chose a
>>> dusty old copy from 1919, and nope, no royalty dues required.
>>>
>>> What LM has done here is probably more on the "lifted a pinky
>>> finger" end of the Effort-Expended-Scale (as opposed to the
>>> "butt-load-o-work" end), but the safest thing to do would still be
>>> to copy the individual FLOSS distros off the DVD individually, or
>>> even better, use it as a conceptual idea for building the LUGs even
>>> better Disk of Distros, and download fresh copies from the internet,
>>> and make copies available on more idealistic terms (License Terms
>>> like: "Make Lots of Copies. Go wild. Put your own LUG's name on
>>> it! Run Linux! Enjoy!")
>>>
>>> -Cedric
>>>
>>> On 19-Mar-07, at 1:14 AM, Bob Jonkman wrote:
>>>
>>>> This is what Richard Weait <kwlug-disc at kwlug.org> said
>>>> about "Re: [kwlug disc.] Linux Magazine" on 18 Mar 2007 at 5:39
>>>>
>>>>>> Joe wrote:
>>>>>>> Does anyone happen to know if (where) Linux Magazine can be
>>>>>>> purchased
>>>>>>> from local retailers (in Ontario)?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The magazine has a website at http://www.linux-magazine.com/
>>>>>
>>>>> KW Bookstore is worth a look. Lots of Linux-related magazines last
>>>>> time I was there. Also it is a chance to shop locally without the
>>>>> bookstore cartel.
>>>>
>>>> KW Bookstore http://www.kwbookstore.on.ca/ definitely does carry
>>>> Linux Pro Magazine
>>>> http://linux-magazine.ca . If they're out it's because I just
>>>> bought the last copy of the
>>>> March issue this week.
>>>>
>>>> It came with a DVD of 11 small Linux distributions. I'm thinking
>>>> this would be nice-to-copy
>>>> for the LUG, but the magazine claims "No material may be reproduced
>>>> in any form whatsoever in
>>>> whole or in part without the written permission of the
>>>> publishers." Does that comply with
>>>> the various GNU licences that the distros are based on?
>>>>
>>>> Irony alert: Have I violated the publisher's rights by quoting
>>>> their statement on violating
>>>> their rights?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --Bob.
>>>>
>>>> -- -- -- --
>>>> Bob Jonkman <bjonkman at sobac.com> http://sobac.com/sobac/
>>>> SOBAC Microcomputer Services Voice: +1-519-669-0388
>>>> 6 James Street, Elmira ON Canada N3B 1L5 Cel: +1-519-635-9413
>>>> Networking -- Office & Business Automation -- Consulting
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>>>>
>>>>
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> | CCj/ClearLine - Unix/NT Administration and TCP/IP Network Services
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> Cedric Puddy, IS Director cedric at thinkers.org
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