Give it away now
RHCP
Some thoughts from other people about this as a start. Thanks to DB for the prompt!
From Seth Godin
How to protect your ideas in the digital age
So, how to protect your ideas in a world where ideas spread?
Don’t.
Instead, spread them. Build a reputation as someone who creates great ideas, sometimes on demand. Or as someone who can manipulate or build on your ideas better than a copycat can. Or use your ideas to earn a permission asset so you can build a relationship with people who are interested. Focus on being the best tailor with the sharpest scissors, not the litigant who sues any tailor who deigns to use a pair of scissors.
Please don’t buy this book
This an interesting case of tragedy and solution in the creative commons.
Simple thoughts about fair use
Copyright is not an absolute. Potato chips are absolute.
Andy Baio on Fair Use
In his influential paper on fair use, Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote, “Factor One is the soul of fair use.” Stanford’s Fair Use Center asks, “Has the material you have taken from the original work been transformed by adding new expression or meaning? Was value added to the original by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings?”
Andy Baio – Waxy.org
Tim O’Reilly
Piracy is progressive taxation, and other thoughts on the evolution of online distribution
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy…
SOPA and PIPA are bad industrial policy
At O’Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We’ve watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet’s unparalleled ability to reach new customers “though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised.”
Kevin Kelly
Better than Free
The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
…
When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Others
Further reading at techdirt.
*I’ll add to this list periodically.