Attn: Gordon: Your "Electronics for Dummies"

I respectfully disagree with you on this.

I'm not sure I buy that argument. In the "arts," there are always popular "stars" and people who can't make a living at it. Edgar Allen Poe died penniless. Whether or not someone can make a living at their art is of no consequence to society or quality.

It is a harsh world, and though we may wish for an idealistic solution, sometimes reality is quite unfair.

Which serves society better? DRM and the regulation of thoughts and ideas by large corporations and governments, or paying authors with an obsolete methodology.

Sorry, I believe that removing the old guard of publishers and media companies and the laws that have been enacted to prop them up, will make way for artists and creators to better make a living. Publishers and media companies have only been around for a short time, artists have been around for about the same amount of time as prostitutes.

Ah ha! Pay up! LOL.

"accidentally" go over the speed limit? Umm, OK. I "believe" that.

Paying artists or not has never affected the supply of art, it has, of course, affected art dealers.

Actually, society has spoken, it thinks it is OK to download and copy media. It is government and corporations that are trying to make this "wrong."

That is clearly not true. Most ELUA documents limit what you can do with the software, far beyond fair use. They also seek to limit liability. Seek to degrade your rights to privacy. Seek to eliminate your right of first sale.

Take about and hour and carefully read Microsoft's EULA for Windows XP.

If I use it at work and I use it at home, I am only using one copy, right? That scenario should be fair use, should it not?

Microsoft, with its EULA, seeks to eliminate right of first sale. If you buy a computer with XP, but do not wish to use XP, and use Linux, Microsoft calls selling the XP software illegal.

Furthermore, if you "use" the software, you can not then sell it, no matter what. At least no legally.

The EULA is not copyright law.

You snipped the argument and addressed none of it, simply restated your position without logical reason. That's pretty lame, so lets look at the argument again:

When you sell software, you are assigning or conveying a license to someone else for compensation. Unless you are the author, you have no right to do any such thing. GPL software is available to anyone who abides by the GPL and the GPL states that you are not legally permitted to re-license the software.

You have every right to sell the CD on which the software is recorded. You have every right to copyright an aggregation of GPL packages. You have every right to sell the boxes in which your CD with your copyrighted aggregation is transferred.

Assuming of course our government still works. I have deep fears about that as well.

I have *never* stated that I agree with DRM or with the RIAA. In fact I think that for many reasons both of these are bad for society.

Have you ever tried to stay at *exactly* the speed limit? Perhaps if I did some road rallies I'd have the experience. :)

Hmmm. You are making a bunch of assumptions there. There are many books I've enjoyed that wouldn't have been written had the authors not thought they were going to be paid.

Many people have said that is what they *want*. They haven't said this is good for society. There is a distinction.

You also haven't read the EULAs. There is some give and take.

The software I was thinking of, Microsoft Word, had wording in it that gave you the right to use your workplace copy at home. In the usual situation of working for somebody else, you do not have the right to use your employer's software for your own use (unless they cede that right to you).

That is because Microsoft entered into a contract with the computer reseller to sell them Windows at a highly discounted rate. Therefore the limitation on resale.

No, it is a condition of sale, and the legality is up for debate in many places.

That is because I wanted to keep the attributions down.

Actually you aren't. You are *selling* a piece of software. The GPL gives me the right to transfer copies to anybody I choose to as long as I stick to the GPL. At no time do I claim copyright on somebody else's software.

I also have a right to charge whatever I want for the priviledge of downloading GPL software, or selling it by any means. The copyright owner has agreed to be bound by the conditions of the GPL and has given away his rights to prevent copies from being made.

And that too shall eventually change.

-- D. Jay Newman Author of _Linux Robotics_

But these are the same things!!

You could always drive under the limit.

The availability of a particular work is subject to a lot of factors, including, historically of course, the quality of scotch available to the author.

I'm not sure I agree, what you or I think is "good" for society is different than what society does, which is by definition, what society does.

Actually, I have had to read a LOT of eula, they are very scary documents.

I find this absurd that we think this is correct.

The contract between Microsoft and the computer reseller is not a contract into which YOU have entered, and thus should not be binding on you.

Correction, it is not a condition of "sale," as you can buy it without agreeing to it. (often times can't even read it prior to sale.) It is a condition of use, well, actually, ownership as it controls what you can do with your property.

This is not true. In a copyrighted work, unless you sell ownership of the work (which you can't because you don't own it), you are actually selling a license or right to use it. Since GPL gives people these rights anyway, you are not selling anything.

Yes, "transfer copies," and that's key. Look at my statements below.

Exactly, thus you can't sell "the software" but you can sell the process of providing such copies. It is a semantic argument in most cases, but there are important differences.

Hopefully

: While violating your copyright may cost you some sales, it doesn't : actually take anything from you. And sometimes illegal copies may : increase sales.

I made a number of posts in this discussion that seem to have been swallowed by my news provider. Which may be a good thing, as not only was I not saying what I was thinking correctly, there are people who say it better.

Aside from you :-) Baen books has been giving away free un-DRMed copies of some of their books for a few years now, and claim it makes them money. There are essays on the subject there by actual professional authors who say why much better than I did:

If the marked for technical books has gotten as bad as you (collective you) have said it is, IMHO as a reader y'all might want to talk to Jim Baen. If anyone has figured out how to make money in a niche market, he has. Not necessarily the same niche, but I would bet he has some ideas.

Ok I know that this thread has been beat to death, but I hadn't checked the group in a while and this is a subject that is dear to me. As someone who has made a living at creating software, I feel the pain of writers who now face illegal copying and publishing of their work.

It's true that the publishing world is changing thanks (or no thanks) to the Internet, and this means that book publishing as we know it will soon be dead, mostly that is. I believe that books will never go away completely, only the ability to make large sums of money on them. I, like Gorden, prefer to have an original paper copy of someone's work. However, within a few generations, that will no doubt change as the digital world becomes second nature to most humans, and the idea of paper as medium is looked down upon as old tech.

There may still be a silver lining for writers though. One possible direction is pay per access web sites. By removing the publisher altogether and making your work available to the masses through a self controlled pay site, you may be able to generate enough revenue to live off of (maybe), especially if the text is searchable by search engines, but not accessible without a password. This means there needs to be an API that allows seach engines like Google to search copyrighted text, but only return an excerpt of the original text and the main web address.

This would mean that all the search engines would have to be on board with the idea, or at least be forced to be on board with it by the feds. I'm not in favor of the feds strong arming the industry, but this is about copyright infringement and if the industry is not willing to police itself and protect original work, the feds will have no choice.

Just a thought...

Shawn

Shawn B. wrote: ...

Someone must have forgotten to tell JK Rowling, the author of the popular Harry Potter series who is now richer than the Queen of England.

-- JC

Obviously I didn't mean today. Soon meaning in the next few generations. Although you can begin to see the effects on the younger generations even today. Anyone with kids has seen a fundamental change in the way they read vs. their parents. Personally, I stopped buying the newspaper years ago and read it on-line.

Shawn

I did not mean for such a large OT convo to run. I just thought you might want to let the posters ISP be aware of copyright infringement.

I will be honest, if it was your older Bonanza books I would not have said anything. But it is your new book so I thought I would let you know. Plus there were A LOT of books that would be useful here like the OOPIC/PIC programing guides. I have your hard copy of the first 2 Robotics books and still refer back to them. But i think that how some books are treated is way off base for the copyright law. Like Hero 1 books. the thing was back in 85, Give the manuals away and sell the parts/kits.

The Hirudinea

I haven't heard of lightningsource.com but there's a relatively well known company called Lulu that was founded by Bob Young (co-founder of Red Hat). The do exactly what you're suggesting. You can upload your content and anyone who wants to can buy it in a variety of different dead tree forms. There's no cost to the author of any kind for the POD service. If you'd like, they also offer distribution services for a small fee.

You can browse available books here:

If you do a search on robotics, you'll find some interesting stuff.

-Steve

Most POD resellers use Lightningsource, which is the actual printer. Outfits like Lulu.com act as middlemen, and Lightningsource is designed to interface with the trade. However, if your book submission meets their technical requirements they'll work with individuals.

Lulu, Cafepress, iUniverse, Xlibris, and a whole slew of others are great if you're doing just one book, and/or you don't want to deal with the mechanics. But if you're going to do several, it pays to get your own block of ISBNs, learn the technical requirements of Lightningsource, and go direct. Rather than paying you a "royalty," you keep 100% of the net price of the book (i.e., minus printing and distribution costs, which you must pay regardless of who's used). You'd be surprised what "free" means to POD resellers.

-- Gordon

I didn't plan to get too involved in this discussion, because I do plan to use it in a research paper I'm writing, (yes, i'll cite everyone I quote) but I have to respond to this. And please, don't think I'm advocating what the guy did by posting the book... I just want to point out a flaw with this one statement.

Since it was the meaning of the little black marks on the pages of your book which got copied onto that newsgroup, and not the actual marks themselves, then obviously the posting of the book online, in a totally different form, was not a copyright infringement. No need for further duscussion. All the man copied was the meaning, after all...

Um, you see the problem with your argument? Copyright DOES protect the meaning. If it didn't, then any change, at all, to the format (color, type size, binding method, etc...) of a book would protect it from copyright law. I could reprint your book on light purple paper, and say that the only thing I copied was the meaning... "look, the format is different! It's obviously a different work, not a copy" and that argument would fly!

That guy didn't post your book, he posted the meaning of your book. Your book was not in a form that COULD be posted. It had to be converted into pure meaning, and then into a different form that could convey that meaning before he could post it.

You're mistaken. Ideas are precisely what copyright, and patent for that meatter, attempt to protect, and that is why copyright and patent are having such a hard time here in the information (read that: IDEA) age.

[snip a lot of stuff]

Double Sigh.

Please read the following circular from the US Government copyright office:

I'll quote the relevant section to you:

WHAT IS NOT PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT?

Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others:

...

Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, as distinguished from a description, explanation, or illustration

...

Here is the same information from the US Copyright Office FAQ:

How do I protect my idea?

Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.

Also from the FAQ:

What is copyright infringement?

As a general matter, copyright infringement occurs when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.

When Gordon's book was posted on alt.binaries.e-books.technical, the person who did the posting was guilty of infringing on the Electronics for Dummies copyright. People who download copies from ABET are also guilty of copyright infringement.

In general it is nice to theorize about copyrights, but please do a little homework first.

-Wayne

Sure. And the Patent Office should be closed down because everything that can ever be invented, has already been invented. (Actually, it /should/ be closed down, because it is a haven for the most egregious kind of abuses, but that's a separate thread).

Everything I've ever had published has been leaked onto the Internet.

My first book was released at a time when the publisher was experimenting with including the text as a PDF on an accompanying CD-ROM. That PDF showed up on the peer-to-peer networks before the official release date. The publisher no longer offers this text option, btw.

My second book was physically dissected by someone and digitized using a page-fed scanner. (Actually, at least two such "someones" did it). I believe the electronic downloadable edition also had its DRM stripped off, and that became a third electronic edition. All of those editions are floating about on the networks.

I anticipate my third book will encounter a similar attack as soon as it comes out of copyedit.

It hasn't stopped me from starting my fourth book.

Do yourself the favor of learning a thing or two about a subject you post about. You can find literally tons of information on copyright basics online, and all it takes is a little effort on your part to educate yourself. Within the first page of even the simplest of brochures on copyright you will find the explanation that copyright protects expression, and not ideas. Simple stuff, easy to learn. Please do, and stop spreading false information.

-- Gordon

Speaking of which, I've seen lots of parts of robots but not complete functioning robots that you've built. Care to share ? Have you entered any contests ?

I'm not into contests.

For what I've been concentrating on the last six years or so you can visit BudgetRobotics.com. Keeps me busy enough.

-- Gordon

I've seen those excellent pages and read all your books. I'm a fan, however, I find it some what discouraging that one of the most knowledge people in amateur robotics doesn't seem to actually build complete, functioning, autonomous robots. None appear in your books; none are show cased. Curious. I continue to value your excellent advice.

There is no such thing as a "complete, functioning robot," IMO. Anyone who stops building at a given point and says, "Here's a complete robot," hasn't set his sights very high.

If you mean a robot with a CPU or microcontroller, some programming, and some sensors, of course I've built those. Frankly, I don't find it very fun.

My thing is subsystems. It's what I'm good at, and it's the approach I intentionally used in my books. My greatest satisfaction is seeing how other people use the concepts I've worked out, not in giving directions on how they can build exactly what I built. BORING! The same with the kits I offer at Budget Robotics. They are starter bases, and people do some wondering things with them that I NEVER would have thought of. Can you imagine how thrilling *that* is, as opposed to seeing how people followed my directions for a "complete, functioning" robot?

(Mind you, I'm not knocking David Cook or Gareth Branwyn or some of of the others who take this approach. There's room for many methods of learning. I just happen to prefer empirical exploration with extrapolation.)

Competitions aren't a karmic experience for me, and I dislike the spotlight. But I know many of the students who get my kits use them in competitions. Sometimes they win, and very occasionally they share their success with me in an e-mail. At this point in my robotics interests, I find this is more personally gratifying than building "complete, functioning" robots -- whatever those are.

There...you've glimpsed inside the mind of Gordon McComb. Other than the above, it's pretty empty.

-- Gordon

Robot, Schmobot. Don't forget Gordon's unique and unparalleled talent of spotting the purple panties in an otherwise randomly cluttered "where's Waldo" dorm room photo. That alone has raised Gordon to the level of minor deity in my mind :-) If he can build robots, too, well, so much the better.

Cheers,

-Brian