Why? (was: A request for permission to use copyrighted FAQ's)

---------

Lutz Prechelt (prechelt@ira.uka.de)
Fri, 18 Mar 1994 11:38:52 +0100

1. There is not much money to make from a book collection of FAQs
(perhaps on the order of 10^5 Dollars)
2. Very many people (far more than thousand) have contributed to
the FAQ that would be in such a collection
3. This means the would-be fraction of profit every contributor would get
if profit was divided amongst all of them is at most a few dozen Dollars.
4. The chances that anybody will really sue for a copyright infringement
of his/her FAQ contribution are very small ( < 0.1%/contributor ?)

So I ask myself: Why ask for permission to use FAQs at all ?

Why not just go ahead, use them (saving LOTS of work spent asking for
permissions and sending release forms back and forth), and prophylactically
defend against lawsuits by

a) donating a significant share (one third?) of the profits to an institution
that supports FAQs/USENET/Internet in a way (eg. buying rtfm hardware) and
b) making a machine-readable version of the book available for anonymous ftp.

I am sure that (b) wouldn't impede the sales of the book too much, because
who ever worked with the piles of paper that a laserprinter spits out
printing a whole book knows that the value of a properly bound book is
significantly higher. So if the book is reasonably priced, (b) might
even improve sales by making the book more widely known.

Lutz

Lutz Prechelt (email: prechelt@ira.uka.de) | Whenever you
Institut fuer Programmstrukturen und Datenorganisation | complicate things,
Universitaet Karlsruhe; 76128 Karlsruhe; Germany | they get
(Voice: ++49/721/608-4068, FAX: ++49/721/694092) | less simple.

[ Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive | Search Mail Archive | Authors | Usenet ]
[ 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 ]

---------

faq-admin@landfield.com

© Copyright The Landfield Group, 1997
All rights reserved