Embedded systems publishers

A little internet detective work reveals Ray to be a troll...

And a professional magician...

Why he's posting on comp.arch.embedded is beyond me. I'll be ignoring him from here on out.

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007 16:16:12 -0800, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Jim Stewart instead replied:

Your loss. Bye, bye.

-- Ray

A book was sold as a single copy not a license to republish. The author licensed the publisher to publish a copyrighted work on exchange for each copy published. The whole reason for copyright laws is for the better part of 500 years the development and production of the first copy of a work is many times the cost of reproducing the work.

Copyrights and publishing have a business models that distributes development and production costs across the distributed copies.

w..

That's all very well, but the duration of copyright is often impossible. I consider it should revert to the original author whenever the item goes out of print, and that its total duration should be strictly limited. At present that duration can be something like 100 years or more. The durations should, somehow, be tied to the subject matter. For example, an original book on programming with PL1 is obviously not copyrightable today, but one on wood finishing probably deserves a longer period.

For example I obviously retain copyright on the software I published 20 and 30 years ago. Those copyrights are worthless, and will never be enforced. I also see absolutely no point to copyrights on popular songs of, say, the 1950s. It is not too many years now since the copyrights on Gilbert and Sullivan finally expired, from the 1800s. Ridiculous.

By not tying a copyright to the subject matter there is no argument about which subject a copyright fits. The copyright holder may choose to release works onto the public domain.

An author may or may not transfer a copyright to a publisher. Many publication contracts are only a license to publish not a transfer of copyright. Many publication agreements revert copyrights if a item goes out of print others do not.

It is interesting that you mention Gilbert and Sullivan because they were responsible in part for the US to recognize international copyrights. Prior to Gilbert and Sullivan copyrights in the US protected American works and not foreign works.

Copyrights have have other uses, they are the tool that FSF uses to control their software distribution and development.

Regards

-- Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited Tel. (519) 888-6911 Fax (519) 746 6751

In a recent published paper, the optimal copyright period has been pegged at 14 years. However all over the world corporations and other groups are lobbying to have it extended to the detriment of most people.

Regards Anton Erasmus

What ever the length of copyright is just a number that becomes part of the business decision. 14 Years would cover many maybe most cases. In the computer software business there are still a few standard references that have survived beyond 14 years. Hart's book is still the best reference on function series terms. He is dead and his family currently owns the copyright. K&R arguably is still important.

In the arts category there are still many copyrights with value well beyond 14 years. Elvis's music and Picasso prints for example.

The fact that there are publishing houses that specializes in publishing works with expired copyrights exist (Dover comes to mind) is a testament to there is value in a work after copyrights expire.

Regards

-- Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited Tel. (519) 888-6911 Fax (519) 746 6751

There is no dispute that value can still reside in material after the copyright expires. The problem is that another person cannot build on top of previous work, even when there is no monetary value left. For a book for instance, if the original puplisher cannot puplish it cheap enough, or market it well enough, then no one else can. Many of the songs being illegally downloaded, one can only buy second hand from specilised shops on vinyl. Even if one does that, then in many cases it is illegal to convert it to MP3 and listen to it on one's MP3 player. In most cases, the original creator of the work does not retain copyright, it sits with some faceless corporation who are only interested in corporate profits. Even if they make absolutely no money from something, they refuse people to be able to use it. If it is made available, it is done with the most draconic DRM. The avarage person already battles to something simple like copying a MP3 from their PC to an MP3 player. IMO the current copyright laws does not protect the actual creators of the work, they only give a monoply for some faceless corporation, which as an entity is only out to exploit the people. Hoe many first time authors actually retain copyright on their own works ?

Regards Anton Erasmus

As you point out copyright is about the control of a work after it is created.

Librarians will tell you that most rare books are less than 20 years old, they are limited run, privately published or published to a limited audience. The internet has done a lot for many limited works, authors have made these works available electronically free or for a fee. Most journal articles are available on line for a fee. There is nothing that does or should compels a work to be available.

You make a case for clarifying the rules for use of electronic copies and I don't have an opinion on where this is going to go. The music industry has done several things that point in the right direction. They have created an electronic version of publishing that is quite low cost and they have at the same time strengthened the public's understanding that copyright is about the control and use of a created work. {flame suit on}

The current copyright laws do protect the actual creators of a work. So much so that major parts of copyright protections do not even require a work to be registered. I am not a lawyer but this is my understanding.

Authors exchange copyrights control for gain (as it should be) according to a contractual agreement, or they may self publish or they may sit on it and do nothing.

Unfortunately many first time authors barely read publishing agreements or consult legal advice. The should know what they are doing.

Regards

-- Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited Tel. (519) 888-6911 Fax (519) 746 6751

On Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:27:13 -0500, Walter Banks wrote:

I think it is more a case of if you are the proverbial "starving artist" with talent, then at the start you have absolutely zero bargening power. You have to accept whatever the big companies deign to offer you. IMO the fact that the internet via P2P networks are making an alternative start possible, is what the recording industry is actually fighting. IMO Copyright must be one of those rights, which an individual are not allowed to sign over. In many of the countries where a few powerfull companies control over 90% of the economy, a person is for all practical purposes living in a feudal state. If you do not tow the line, then you do not work, hence do not eat. It is basically a similar closed system as was the Company Script systems in the USA during the 1900s (Not quite sure of the date, but when the famous Carnegie of Carnegie hall fame was one of the big steel company owners) In practice the big recording industry companies are protected by the copyright laws. You cannot get your work to an audience without signing away your rights. As I said before the P2P networks are changing this, and THAT is what the big companies are fighting. That is why they try and equate downloading with theft. For any product, in general, if a person feels he gets value for money, they are willing to pay it. If they feel they are being ripped off, then even though something is illegal, most people are more concerned on whether they are doing the morally right thing.

For those people that argue, that one should always do the legal thing. Then think off the NAZI laws that in essence forced you to provide information on any Jews. Think of the Apartheid laws that forced one to chase away customers based on their race. Complying with these laws was legal, but they were not moral. IMO laws should protect people, not entities. The fact that a Corporation in the USA is legally a person are already and is going to cause huge suffering in the future. The People controling such an entity is for all practical purposes invulnerable to the law. If the "Corporation" kills people, the "Corporation" is punished.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Nobody less than a blockbuster author has any bargaining power with the publishing system. Distribution of work is much easier now, yes, because electronic distribution is almost free. However, promotion still costs as much as it ever did. Self-published works are promoted mostly by word of mouth. You get loyal customers that way (assuming your product doesn't suck), but not large numbers of them.

Even Stephen King can't walk into his publisher's office and say "I want five Cadillacs in advance, and I want you to print eleventy thousand copies of this new book, shrinkwrap them with $100 bills inside, and drop them over impoverished South American nations".

For sheer return on effort working with publishing house to position a work within a series of works covering a specific area written in a similar style. This leverages promotion costs. The publishing business is an exponential business for every blockbuster author there is a bunch of people who make very little and often do it for different reasons including peer recognition and career resume material. Technical publications have a limited market with the single exception of educational textbooks.

I don't buy publication conspiracies especially in technical titles. Most publishers I know are continuously looking for technical titles.

I know from experience that how copyrights are handled are not a deal killer in agreements with publishers.

Regards

-- Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited Tel. (519) 888-6911 Fax (519) 746 6751

For the sake of argument, exactly how many books have you:

a) written and had published (excluding self-publishing and vanity publishing), b) tried to negotiate different contract terms on something simple (say, a bigger advance), and c) tried to negotiate different contract terms on something complex (say, retail pricing or electronic versions or copyright reversion at some specific sales figure)?

The fact that there are publishing houses that specialize in publishing works with expired copyrights is a testament that there is value to having copyrights expire.

Most of these books would not be available (apart from antiquarian booksellers) if they were still in copyright.

Do you realize how hard it would be to track down Homer's heirs and assignees if you had to pay them royalties?

There are lots of early movies that are deteriorating on their old nitrocellulose stock because nobody can find out who they belong to, and so even if they were restored, they couldn't be distributed.

I conclude you're unwilling or unable to learn the distinctions between cause and effect, present and future, or possibility and fact.

Neither is the word yours to change the legal or moral meaning of. In any remotely sane legal system, theft is defined as some minor variation of "taking a thing away from its owner, as an attempt to enrich oneself". Making an unlicensed copy fails to fit that definition exactly on the "taking away" aspect, because the owner still has the object after the act.

Correct. But copying a book is neither stealing a book, nor is it theft. It's a copyright violation. Whether or not that's legal is a completely separate issue from whether theft is illegal.

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:03:34 +0100, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Hans-Bernhard Bröker instead replied:

The more you protest, the more you appear to be a person who condones theft.

-- Ray

properly

fact.

Einstein's

don't

No, "thief" does not work, any more than "pirate".

My understanding (which probably varies according to country) is that there are two separate concepts when making unlicensed copies. One is personal use copying, involving no money - it is "copyright infringement" and is illegal, meaning you can be sued for it in a civil court. The other is when you sell such counterfeit copies for a profit, which is a crime - meaning you can be tried by the state, and jailed (or fined).

In neither case is it theft, but copyright infringement (or possibly also breaking a license or contract).

Theft consists of two parts - the rightful owner loses something, and the perpetrator gains it. With copyright infringement, you only have half of this - thus it is no more "theft" than vandalism or wilful destruction of property is "theft" (it's the first half, but not the second half).

It's only stealing if the rightful owner no longer has that "something".

I'm not justifying or defending copyright violation, but mislabelling it helps no one.

People who sell unlicensed copies of books, software, music, or whatever are not thieves - but they *are* criminals, and should be treated as such by law enforcement and justice systems.

When there is no financial issues involved, the people making the copies are breaking the law, but are not criminals. It doesn't help to call them criminals or exaggerate the issues with idiotic valuations of the money "lost" to illegal copying. Almost everybody in the western world is guilty of illegal copying - can *you* claim that you have never videotaped a television program and kept the tape for more than 30 days, or watched it more than once? Have you never copied some music for a friend? Have you never used a demo version of software for more than strictly evaluation purposes? The list of such common petty infringements is endless.

How much of a problem unlicensed copying is varies enormously depending on what is being copied, by whom, why, and where. There are certainly situations where people copy instead of buying licensed versions, and then the publishers lose out. But there are plenty of situations where publishers gain, or at least do not lose. Many studies have shown that people who illegally download a lot of music often buy more CD's than those who do not, and Bill Gates is on record saying that he'd rather people used illegal copies of Microsoft software than legally buy a competitors software. In this case, regarding copies of books, I have absolutely no idea whether illegal copying results in more or less sales in the end - but it certainly leads to a wider audience.

Laws, morals and ethics are three separate concepts which overlap in large parts. But the idea that they are this close is ridiculous. Morals are a personal choice - laws are determined by the state. Ethics lie somewhat in between, and are perhaps more based on the community. Thus a state's authorities may pass a law allowing people to be imprisoned indefinitely without charge - that does not make it ethical, and most people would find it immoral. Similarly, it *is* legal to cheat at Ludo, yet it is unethical.

The legality of various types of copying is complicated (is it legal to copy a song from a CD onto your mp3 player? People disagree) - the morality and ethics is even more complicated. In general, it is not a black-and-white issue. In the particular case of scanning in a printed book, it is undoubtedly illegal (though not a criminal offence unless the scans were sold), and unethical in most cases.

When something is going wrong, the first questions you should be asking is *why* is it going wrong, and how can we stop it going wrong. You don't start by asking who's guilty and how they can be punished. This applies a social issue, such as popular copying of copyrighted works, as any other issue. We all (creators, owners, and users of copyrighted works, and society in general) should be thinking about *why* people make copies, what effect it has, what better systems could be used and how to make such changes. Figuring out how much to fine people should be way down on that list, and is not relevant unless and until it has been decided (by the relevant country) that this is a practical, ethical, and legal reaction, with an overall benefit for society.

On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:48:09 +0100, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and David Brown instead replied:

properly

fact.

that

Einstein's

better.

don't

Yes, it is theft. Take something that doesn't belong to you and it is stealing. Gloss it over any way you wish but it is theft. It's ALSO all of the other things you bring up. But, at the end of the day, it is primarily theft.

Nonsense. You can steal a service like a taxi ride or a bus ride. That's even more confusing because the driver hasn't had a physical thing stolen in either case. Yet, the police prosecute theft of service regularly.

Pretending it's something else isn't helping either. It's theft.

Most of what you wrote here is valid along with the fact that making illegal copies is theft. It's all those other things, too, but basically it is theft. It starts out as the taking of something of value which has not been paid for. Period.

-- Ray

properly

fact.

that

the

Einstein's

better.

don't

It is possible that the technical legal details of "theft" vary from country to country (for reference, I'm in a Scot living in Norway). But depriving the rightful owner of the thing in question is, AFAIK, critical to the definition of "theft":

Here's another few links from google:

If you are depriving the victim of something, then it would be theft (although I don't think that term would be used here). Thus riding a taxi without paying could be called "theft of service". For a bus ride, it's more questionable since you are not taking anything away from the bus company.

You can define "theft" as "taking something of value" - but in the case of copyright infringement, you are *copying* something of value. It's illegal (except under authorised circumstances, of course), and it might be a crime (if you are profiting from it), but you are not *taking* anything. If someone copies Lewin's book, he will almost certainly never know about it, and he will not be deprived of his book or otherwise restricted in using or selling it. This is a totally different concept from someone taking a physical book of his shelf and carrying it out the door.