Apple's iBooks EULA Drawing Ire 308
An anonymous reader writes in with one of many articles about the iBooks EULA, this time questioning whether it is even enforceable. Quoting: "The iBooks Author EULA plainly tries to create an exclusive license for Apple to be the sole distributor of any worked created with it, but under the Copyright Act an exclusive license is a 'transfer of copyright ownership,' and under 17 U.S.C. 204 such a transfer 'is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.' When authors rebel and take their work elsewhere, Apple has, at most, a claim for breach-of-EULA — but their damages are the failure to pay $0 for the program."
Re:Sole commercial distributor, not sole distribut (Score:4, Informative)
Not really, people distributing their works for money aren't typically going to also distribute them for free. That would undermine sales. Some people will distribute works under a pay what you can, pay what you want or pay what you think it's worth model, but in any of those cases it's going to be a commercial distribution.
It might be technically a misstatement, but it's correct in virtually all cases.
You... realise it's just a proprietary html editor (Score:5, Informative)
First entry up on google for self publishing epubs:
http://www.lulu.com/ [lulu.com]
They even do paper versions.
Re:After what Apple did with iTunes DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, PDF is an open standard and Adobe has granted anybody royalty free use of it. There may be patents that are not known that could apply, but for now there aren't any that have been asserted.
The MP3 patents are most likely expired by now in the US, that should apply to other jurisdictions as well as the US presently conforms with the WTO's TRIPs
Re:After what Apple did with iTunes DRM (Score:5, Informative)
PDF is free and open now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf [wikipedia.org]
Relevant snippet:
"While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001,[4] PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.[1][5] In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.[6]"
Summary is wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Apple isn't demanding to be sole distributor of your works, just of the format it's tool creates. Go ahead and distribute your works elsewhere, as long as you don't distribute it using their modified ePub3 format. Or distribute your works in their format gratis. That's also okay.
Re:Sigh (Score:1, Informative)
Old FUD is still FUD.
Re:$0 Now, (Score:3, Informative)
Nonsensical (Score:4, Informative)
Apple makes no claims on copyright, or on your work - ONLY on output of the software. You are totally free to format the same work in some other tool and sell that.
Again, to put it another way, It's not exclusive as to your content but ONLY TO OUTPUT FROM THE TOOL.
The free tool, that Apple gave you for free. And they ask to make money if you want to sell something produced with it? How dare they!
Work == File == Document != Content (Score:5, Informative)
Really. It's even in the fscking EULA:
"Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner."
Note the "content". Software (as iBooks Author) creates files or documents or "works", but not content. Authors create content. This content is yours.
If you think this is word-wanking, try the following gedankenexperiment:
You write a book using MS Word for the text, Photoshop for the illustrations and you even buy some high-quality photos for it. Then you import all of that into iBooks Author to create a book for the iBook Store. You also import all of that into InDesign (or whatever software you bought for creating ePubs) to sell elsewhere.
How should the book you created from *your* content be affected by the iBook Author EULA? It isn't. Apple even spells this out in the EULA. The content of course is yours to sell.
I'm not an Apple fanboi and I don't like Apple very much but I think iBook Author and the iBook store is a good idea. I also don't like the EULA terms very much but they are not what some people would like you to think they are. If you want to sell the file created with iBooks Author you can sell it only via Apple. But if you want to sell your content in that book elsewhere you can still do that.
Meanwhile I just hate that kind of sensational journalism that ignores facts and just wants to drive page-views by fueling hate and fury. Really, I'm sick of it. Be rational and READ THE FUCKING EULA.
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:2, Informative)
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
That's really scary!
Thankfully, it's not true. You're free to publish it on any other format, or with any other tool chain. You just can't try to sell the output of iBooks outside of Apple's ecosystem. Of course, I'm not sure why you'd want to, it uses a format that's close to ePub, but not close enough for other eBook stores.
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:5, Informative)
You're still missing the point.
If Apple doesn't publish you. GAME OVER. The only way to get your book out there after that is to give it away...for free!
Nonsense. You only can't publish the very file created by iBooks Author elsewhere. The content you wrote is still yours.
This is even spelled out in the EULA later on. Of course this is desperately ignored in that article and everywhere else.
Re:Apple doesn't claim to own your content (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. This entire post is based on a false premise that you are giving away your rights to your content by using their authoring tool when in fact the only limitation is that you cannot take content created in iBooks Author and sell it elsewhere using the iBooks format. If you want to sell it outside of the app store, create it in a different format.
This article is a lot of nothing..
... of the binary produced by tool, not of content (Score:5, Informative)
Sole commercial distributor, not sole distributor. The quote is a misstatement of the policy.
And this only refers to the binary produced by the iBooks Author program. Apple makes no claim on your content, you are free to produce other ebooks using different tools and distribute elsewhere.
Re:Sole commercial distributor, not sole distribut (Score:4, Informative)
Uhhhh - a lot of people distribute their work both free, and for a fee. http://www.baen.com/library/intro.asp [baen.com]
In fact, the idea that free copies of your work will "undermine sales" is so terribly misguided - I wonder if you've been studying economics at RIAA University.
Re:Apple has no DRM on music... (Score:1, Informative)
Strangely enough, the only devices I've ever seen that plays Apple Advanced Codec are - you'll never guess - Apple devices.
Where as everything plays MP3s, and just about everything that isn't Apple plays WMAs and Ogg Vorbis files. But it doesn't matter, Amazon MP3s will play on everything, while Apple Advanced Codec - well, are Apple only. It's all in the name.
Also, learn how to close your HTML tags.
It's not this complicated (Score:4, Informative)
Apple can't acquire your copyright except through written contract. To paint this as an attempt to 'steal' your copyright in the books you write is simply incorrect.
Apple is merely trying to control how you distribute the files outputted by iBooks Author. This is done to try and keep up Apple's walled-garden approach.
Apple's EULA clearly indicates that copyright in the work is retained by the owner. (Section 2.d of the license.)
Apple's EULA still might not be cool, but it does not try and create an exclusive license. (And even if it did try, it fails.)
A lengthier analysis can be found here: The iBooks Author EULA: What does it really mean? [lextechnologiae.com]
Re:Apple doesn't claim to own your content (Score:5, Informative)