Filesharing and ebooks

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by kennyc

The point was not about selling or making money but whether it would have been published at all.

But it would have been, unless she hid it in the closet (why do that?). It would probably be published on the Net, gain following, and in due time publisher of paper books would have picked it up. Even in the world without copyrights thare would always be people wanting to read on paper, paper costs money, and books would sell. And even now, and years ago there was a subset of books that were promoted actively by publishers, and made much more money than other published books, and always writers wanted to get to that golden circle, and that would stay the same.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

But it would have been, unless she hid it in the closet (why do that?). It would probably be published on the Net, gain following, and in due time publisher of paper books would have picked it up. Even in the world without copyrights thare would always be people wanting to read on paper, paper costs money, and books would sell. And even now, and years ago there was a subset of books that were promoted actively by publishers, and made much more money than other published books, and always writers wanted to get to that golden circle, and that would stay the same.

Not if the publishers believe "everything has already been written" -- which is where this subthread came from.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Not if the publishers believe "everything has already been written" -- which is where this subthread came from.

Luckily publishers don't base their business on beliefs, but on what sells in their experience. It won't matter to them that the book is wholly repetitive, and adds nothing whatever to the books already in public domain. If people are willing to buy it, they'll publish it. But people willing to buy a book just because it's newly written is to me still not a good reason to promote production of repetitive material through maintaining copyright laws.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

Luckily publishers don't base their business on beliefs, but on what sells in their experience. It won't matter to them that the book is wholly repetitive, and adds nothing whatever to the books already in public domain. If people are willing to buy it, they'll publish it. But people willing to buy a book just because it's newly written is to me still not a good reason to promote production of repetitive material through maintaining copyright laws.

Whew!

[caphector]

Originally Posted by kaan

Let me present an open source license that you are probably unfamiliar with.

This is a BSD style license.

When Apple made OSX, they basicly took a whole lot of open source software under this kind of license, and "grabbing their code and selling the butchered corporate-locked version of it".

I'd like to take exception to this:

First, Apple did (and does) use parts of BSD in Mac OS X. Their fork of BSD is still open source and called Darwin. They also contribute code back to BSD. In addition, Apple is an active contributor to many open source projects (LLVM and Webkit, to name two).

In short, Apple is going above and beyond what the license strictly requires; they have made mistakes with OSS, but in general they've worked to improve their relations with developers.

Apologies for this tangent.