Re: Amazon charging for PG books
oh my goodness, where have you been, al? this sure ain't news. and newby wonders if it's "ethical". spare me the deliberations. here's the thing: project gutenberg could have set itself up as a publisher with amazon, and sold its e-books for whatever it wants to charge, but project gutenberg decided not to do that. you could've also dictated that every page of every one of the books was available under amazon's "look inside this book" functionality. but again, you decided not to go that route. was that a good decision? heck no, it was a _stupid_ decision... but that's the decision that project gutenberg made. so live with it, and live with the consequences... and tell your contributors that _they_ need to live with it too... heck, jim even came here _begging_ you to make things better... he even did the work for you, and mounted the solution himself. but his efforts were ignored. you might wanna read this recent article from time magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_2032746_... the takeaway sentence is this:
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
of course, _free_and_easy_ tops everything. but you opted out of that. and now you want to whine. -bowerbird
Sigh... I quite plainly said in my original post (which bowerbird didn't bother to include) that the link was sent to me by a submitter, which I reposted to gutvol-d. I'm well aware that Amazon and others are harvesting from PG and reselling. -----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of Bowerbird@aol.com Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2010 12:25 PM To: gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org; bowerbird@aol.com Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Amazon charging for PG books oh my goodness, where have you been, al? this sure ain't news. and newby wonders if it's "ethical". spare me the deliberations. here's the thing: project gutenberg could have set itself up as a publisher with amazon, and sold its e-books for whatever it wants to charge, but project gutenberg decided not to do that. you could've also dictated that every page of every one of the books was available under amazon's "look inside this book" functionality. but again, you decided not to go that route. was that a good decision? heck no, it was a _stupid_ decision... but that's the decision that project gutenberg made. so live with it, and live with the consequences... and tell your contributors that _they_ need to live with it too... heck, jim even came here _begging_ you to make things better... he even did the work for you, and mounted the solution himself. but his efforts were ignored. you might wanna read this recent article from time magazine:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/printout/0,29239,2032304_20 32746_2032903,00.html the takeaway sentence is this:
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
of course, _free_and_easy_ tops everything. but you opted out of that. and now you want to whine. -bowerbird
Hi All, I took the time to read the POST article. Newby says its legal!!????? Well, according to the small print: [3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return. O.K. Amazon is not selling on the PG trademark, As it is evident that they are using PG material they should be paying PG something. Yes, proving this legally is difficult and probably costly. But, Newby is absolutely wrong it is not legeal!! To avoid legal battles, why ask amazon to donate couple of thousands to PG. It is peanuts to them and alot to PG! regards Keith. Am 30.11.2010 um 21:24 schrieb Bowerbird@aol.com:
oh my goodness, where have you been, al? this sure ain't news.
and newby wonders if it's "ethical". spare me the deliberations.
On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 3:23 AM, Keith J. Schultz <schultzk@uni-trier.de> wrote:
Hi All, I took the time to read the POST article. Newby says its legal!!????? Well, according to the small print: [3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
Keith, that whole license doesn't apply if they strip out the trademarks. It even says so on the PG website.
On 12/1/10 9:23 AM, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
Yes, proving this legally is difficult and probably costly. But, Newby is absolutely wrong it is not legeal!!
To avoid legal battles, why ask amazon to donate couple of thousands to PG. It is peanuts to them and alot to PG!
PG books tend to be in the public domain. PG doesn't appropriate anything. Amazon making money from PG books is neither illegal, nor immoral. It only proves that ease of access and a nice representation are valued over just having the content available in archaic ASCII-formats. Regards, Walter
It only proves that ease of access and a nice representation are valued over just having the content available in archaic ASCII-formats.
The sad thing is that many "for pay" "public domain" books on Amazon, and on other web sites do not even have as "nice a representation" as the epub and mobi books on the PG site. Some of the "for pay" "public domain" books are weak OCR efforts which have not even been corrected. Of course, with Amazon, you can ask for your money back. But it is sad to see others take the PG volunteers' efforts, degrade them, and then make people to pay for them.
This would be more convincing if even DP knew how to reliably put their ebooks on ereaders without degrading them. And then offered to do it. On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
It only proves that ease of access and a nice representation are valued over just having the content available in archaic ASCII-formats.
The sad thing is that many "for pay" "public domain" books on Amazon, and on other web sites do not even have as "nice a representation" as the epub and mobi books on the PG site. Some of the "for pay" "public domain" books are weak OCR efforts which have not even been corrected. Of course, with Amazon, you can ask for your money back. But it is sad to see others take the PG volunteers' efforts, degrade them, and then make people to pay for them.
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This would be more convincing if even DP knew how to reliably put their ebooks on ereaders without degrading them. And then offered to do it.
In my humble experience many people who volunteer at DP, and many of us who generated "HTML" books directly for PG are working quite hard to do so in a way that will work well for EPUB and MOBI (Kindle). It doesn't help that many of the implementations of the reader software on one or another ereader reader or reader software is more or less whacked. Not that HTML browsers are that much more reliable either. And a basic problem, again, is that HTML is not well suited for describing even pretty simple things that need to be coded in ebooks. It is also not clear to me as one who codes this stuff just how much effort *should* be put into coding HTML that looks pretty on one or another ereader -- this stuff is evolving pretty darned quick now, so its not clear to me how much of this effort is really worthwhile vs. how much will be obsolete six months from now. [But the advice in the wiki EPUB article seems to be good advice in any case.]
A few thoughts: First, I would hope what PG speaks out against the practice of redistributing their efforts under DRM. Second, it's not clear to me re the issue of "authorship" of HTML by volunteers and who the "author" is on such works -- an issue which you guys might want to think about and get cleared up. Seems to me that a human-generated HTML *is* a non-trivial derivative work since the choice of HTML coding *is* a human artistic effort chosen to make the software run well on one or more ebook readers and/or HTML browsers, and as such *is* creative derivative work worthy of copyright. IE I am arguing that writing HTML is writing "software" and is not just "printer's art." Who then is the author of the HTML? Not PG. Is it a "work for hire" when nothing has been paid? *Can* PG redistribute such a work "for pay", and/or add their own headers which include the PG terms for redistribution? IE seems to me that PG is the publisher not the author of the HTML and even if a volunteers "gives" a copy to PG for redistribution it's not clear to me how this permits PG in turn to grant rights to Amazon to redistribute under other terms. This issue is not clear to me, just asking you guys to think clearly about it (as in: hire a lawyer) Certainly as a volunteer I personally would not want PG to be helping Amazon redistribute my HTML efforts under DRM in order to make a profit. This is not just an Amazon issue, the evolving issues with Google also have the potential to turn out very badly, IMHO. -- Jim
In Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
*Can* PG redistribute such a work "for pay", and/or add their own headers which include the PG terms for redistribution?
Sufficiently complex HTML is copyrightable, thought whether any PG HTML reaches that level is questionable. However, anyone PPing for PG knows what they're getting into; whether legally they could object or not, it would strike me as a sleezy thing to do. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
Sufficiently complex HTML is copyrightable, thought whether any PG HTML reaches that level is questionable. However, anyone PPing for PG knows what they're getting into; whether legally they could object or not, it would strike me as a sleezy thing to do.
I've chewed on this for a while, and I agree with you that I think anyone submitting to PG has made a reasonably informed choice to allow PG to distribute the HTML book under the terms of the PG license. Given that that license also allows anyone to strip the PG trademark and the license and then do what they want to do with that book, seems to me that also allows PG to agree to work with Apple or whoever they want to distribute the book without the PG trademark and license. The remaining problem would be if PG describes that HTML as being "public domain." Maybe it is or Maybe it isn't. And it is probably not a good thing for PG to describe a work as being "public domain" if it isn't. This all comes down to I think, whether a legal authority would decide that HTML is "Printers Art" which simply describes the layout of a printed work -- which is not copyrightable IMHO, or whether that HTML is "Computer Code" which then would be a derivative work, and the added HTML of the derivation then would remain under the copyright of the HTML coder -- even assuming that the coder did give an implied license to PG to distribute the work under the typical PG licensing agreement. Seems like the problem could be solved if the HTML coder assigned any residual rights to the HTML code to the US Government for example. Or if the HTML coder agreed explicitly that it is a work for hire. Or, whatever. But again, I Am Not A Copyright Lawyer. [And Reading about Sonny Bono gives me a headache.] [[And I hate meeces to pieces.]]
"Jim" == Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> writes:
Jim> Seems like the problem could be solved if the HTML coder Jim> assigned any residual rights to the HTML code to the US Jim> Government for example. Or if the HTML coder agreed Jim> explicitly that it is a work for hire. Or, whatever. Surely not. This might be OK for US law, but surely would not be OK for citizens of other countries, whose laws do not allow implicit transfer of copyright and in which copyright cannot be lost. And I or many other people would strongly object to transfer any right to any government, but especially to US government. The only solution might be a publication with a different licence, for example one of the variants of Creative Commons, modified to introduce some of PG peculiarities. Carlo
On 12/08/2010 07:40 PM, Jim Adcock wrote:
Certainly as a volunteer I personally would not want PG to be helping Amazon redistribute my HTML efforts under DRM in order to make a profit.
DRM is optional on Amazon. Works sold by PG would have DRM turned off. The move is to preempt other rogues from selling our books for more than the minimun price and with DRM enabled, not to make any money. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
participants (11)
-
Al Haines -
Bowerbird＠aol.com -
David Starner -
don kretz -
Jim Adcock -
Joshua Hutchinson -
Keith J. Schultz -
Marcello Perathoner -
Sparr -
traverso＠posso.dm.unipi.it -
Walter van Holst