On Thu, 25 Mar 1999, Lance Purple <lpurple[_at_]netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 24 Mar 1999, Jason Vogel <jasonvogel[_at_]ibm.net> writes:
> >
> > The thing I can't understand about this whole "decopyright"
> > conversation is why anyone would want to do it. It seems to me that
> > by abandoning your copyright you would enable others to repackage
> > and sell the very expression you intended to be freely available.
>
> If the works are freely available, then of course anyone can try to
> charge money for them. Dover Books already charges money for copies
> of public domain works; at the same time that Project Gutenberg is
> giving them away for free. I don't see why a "decopyrighter" would
> object to this.
It can be noted with Dover, however, that the price of their books, as compared to the prices of other books, is considerably less (esp in their "Thrift Series"). This could be construed as cost of materials and marketing only, much as we do on our campus with reproduced items that are sold in the bookstore. We charge the cost of the repro plus our margin, or cost of making the material available to the student. If there are copyright fees, they are added in to the total cost. With Project Gutenberg and other e-text pages, the material is free, but to obtain a hard copy, one must use one's own materials and resources - ie, computer, printer, paper and time. These are usually not "free".
Barb
Barbara Ruhmann
Text Buyer
UCD Bookstore
University of California, Davis
Phone 530-752-5538
Fax 530-752-4791
http://www-bookstore.ucdavis.edu/
<brruhmann[_at_]ucdavis.edu>
Received on Fri Mar 26 1999 - 15:55:12 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:35 GMT