Sorry, but in your-all cut-and-paste efforts you have assigned blame to me (jimad) for some email that someone else wrote -- not me. Not one word of what you-all attributed to me below was actually written by me. -----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of Greg Newby Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 12:59 PM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: !@! Re: Re: Real Competition to PG On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 07:17:20PM +0100, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Jim Adcock wrote: Isn't it ironic that books snarfed from PG pop up everywhere with the legalese cleanly cut out? Because the PG license requires royalties but the cutting out is for free.
A simple pointer to the CC-Attribution-ShareAlike or CC-Public-Domain license and a single line: this book was produced by Project Gutenberg etc. would have done a much better job because:
- readers would not have been inconvenienced by endless scrolling, - readers would have actually understood the meaning, - the Project Gutenberg name and address would have been kept by at least some republisher and so - the 'electronic path' would have been kept open.
The PG license is nothing but a textbook example of how an organisation goes to great pains to just damage itself.
This isn't fair. The Project Gutenberg license, in its earlier form, was created at about the same time (1991) that Stallman was working on GPL version 1. This predates the CC licenses by decades. We had many thousands of published eBooks before the CC license suite was even thought of. The PG license is a trademark license, with many words devoted to explaining that the eBook is free. Restrictions are for commercial use of the Project Gutenberg name, and are described in many more words (maybe too many, I agree). You know all of this, so I don't even understand why you're bringing this up. Other than the CC public domain grant, the purpose of the PG license is not the same as the CC licenses, nor the GPL or similar "free" licenses. Those are about taking something that is copyrighted, and granting a limited license to use it. The PG license is about clearly stating that the item is public domain, and only restricts how the Project Gutenberg name may be used in conjunction with variations. The current header, with the boilerplate up top, is very close to your "simple pointer" suggestion above. The far longer "small print," after the text, can be reformatted, put in a separate file, etc. While this *could* be referenced by a URL or somesuch, everyone recognizes that the eBook files tend to be redistributed independently of the gutenberg.org site, and that's why they start out at gutenberg.org with the long small print attached. With the structure of the current small print (which has been in place since #2000 or so, and retroactively applied to most of everything else), I think it's as friendly as any other title page, spash page, etc. for mobile devices. All that said, it's certainly possible to change the layout or content of the license. But I don't see how what is suggested above, for header content, is sigificantly different from what we are doing now. -- Greg _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d