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:Next step (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why most real writers drink liquor, not coffee. Just ask Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Jack London or Edgar Allan Poe,
What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it stipulates that you must sign a contract prior to consideration of your work being distributed through iBooks.
What this means. Don't attempt to get published through Apple or you will be beholden to them in perpetuity AND they don't even have to publish it.
Tricky, scheister-y Apple.
Worst part, there will be an endless stream of authors clambering to be first in line to give up their copyrights in exchange for a chance at being published.
That sucks.
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:4, Insightful)
Publishing industry as usual.
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple makes great products, and I was their customer for almost twenty years, but a few years ago I gave them up. I could no longer stand the bullshit and shenanigans which come with all their products. For me, the breaking point came when my next-gen iPod couldn't use the $1 cables I'd had with my previous-gen iPod, and now I was expected to buy Apple-branded chip-locked cables for $50. FIFTY DOLLARS!
No. No, no, no. Fuck you, no. I still own and like my MacBook Pro (from 2007), but it is starting to get a little long in the tooth, and in the next couple years I'll replace it with something other than a Mac. I replaced my iPod with an Android pod. I bought an Android tablet instead of an iPad. I'm a programmer who might write apps, but I don't even consider the iOS platform.
iBooks? Sounds great! The world desperately needs to shake up the textbook industry, and I'm happy that a large company is doing something about it. But no, I won't consider it. Since I gave up Apple, they have continued to release products which look great and reportedly work great, but no, I'm not willing to put up with the bullshit to use them, because that would make me feel like a chump.
I do have a sliver of hope that all the bullshit was due to Steve Jobs' personal hatred for his customers, and now that he is dead perhaps Apple will slowly shed that hatred. There are no signs of that yet, but I would expect it to take a while.
Re:Next step (Score:4, Insightful)
All of the interesting authors are fucked up in one way or another. Normal people don't make compelling art, that's why they're normal.
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:4, Insightful)
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!
At least with normal publishers, if they don't take your book, you can shop it around.
Once you sign that new contract, Apple has full control over you capitalising on your efforts.
That doesn't offend you? Also, it's now NOT evil to bully people just because they're already being bullied?
Wow, just wow.
Apple doesn't claim to own your content (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA said so plainly. The iBooks format is html5 wrapped is a very thin container (Apple likes content standards). Their authoring tool is essentially a specialized html editor. Nothing stops you from taking the content you used to create an iTextBook and then using it to create a nearly identical eTextBook on another platform. You just aren't supposed to take the exact same thinly wrapped .ibook file and make that available outside of Apple's store. Maybe it's a silly clause, but obviously since they don't claim to own your content then they aren't stopping you from releasing said content in any form you choose.
Re:Summary is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
And since their format is a variation of epub, which is both an industry standard AND based upon HTML which is itself based upon plain text, I expect iBook->epub conversion tools to be available in a matter of days. I'd almost bet money that Calibre will be able to import, read, convert, and export iBooks within a couple of weeks.
So to get around Apple's EULA:
1. Create iBook with Apple's tool.
2. Convert to your favorite format.
3. Distribute.
4. There's no need for a "?" here.
5. Profit!
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
At least with normal publishers, if they don't take your book, you can shop it around.
Once you sign that new contract, Apple has full control over you capitalising on your efforts.
That doesn't offend you?
What offends me is people being so dumb that they can't understand the actual situation, which is this:
Most of the work involved in creating a book goes into the content -- text, pictures, research, etc etc etc. Some (not a trivial amount, it is real work) goes into formatting the content in an attractive manner for publication.
Apple's new app covers only the formatting part. It's basically a tool intended to make it easy to create nice looking, featureful e-book files in a format which is exclusive to Apple's platform.
If you use Apple's app to put your content into an iBook format file, Apple isn't claiming ownership of the content. Just that you can't publish the iBooks-formatted version any way except through them. You're perfectly free to use other tools to create an ebook from the same copyrighted source material -- text, pictures, everything -- in some other format, with no restrictions whatsoever. In fact, you could use ePub, which Apple's own viewing app supports, and supports very well, and you can distribute ePubs in literally any way you want, completely independent of Apple.
I don't pretend to know if what Apple's trying to do with this new iBooks format is based on sound legal theory. It doesn't seem like it fits with what I know about copyright law etc., but I am far from a lawyer. However, it's a damn sight short of Apple actually trying to own exclusive rights to book content, the way you're trying to spin it. They only want to own exclusive rights to publish files generated by their tool.
Lots of the outrage about this on the web seems to be about a desire for Apple to give away everything. That is, right now they're giving away a "free" high quality ebook formatting tool, where the real price of the software is that it makes Apple money in the end, either by getting a cut of the sales, or just promoting a format which only works on Apple's devices. People instead want Apple to give away a high quality ebook tool which generates generic, open format ebook files with no hooks.
Guess what, they're never going to do that. You could maybe convince them to generate open format files with no hooks, but I guarantee you the tool wouldn't have a price of $0 any more. They probably sunk a substantial amount of engineering budget into that app and the new book format it generates, and they're going to try to make a profit off it one way or another.
Re:Different forms of viral (Score:5, Insightful)
the GPL is viral by force. When you get something GPL, the output WILL be GPL. It's required.
I don't know what you intended, but what you wrote is patently false.
The output of a GPL program is not affected by the license in any way, shape or form.
If you take someone else's GPL software and you make changes to it, and you distribute those changes, then and only then does the GPL come into play.
Apple's software, on the other hand, is insidious because it does infect the output. You are forbidden from selling the output of that software on any service other than Apple's.
So if what you really meant to say is that GPL has no effect whatsoever on how you use the software (as opposed to how you distribute it), and that Apple's software does... then yes, I couldn't agree more.
Re:Ehhhhh, and? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that there isn't even a correlation there. That's 4 authors and how many other authors were largely sober? Neither William Shakespeare nor Agatha Christie are known for their drunken escapades and they're more published than anybody else.
Re:Apple doesn't claim to own your content (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What they forgot that will make it binding... (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't want Apple to give away anything. They have embraced a standard (EPUB 3), extended it and used that to make a system that encourages people not to bother to redistribute their books in other formats (i.e. extinguish). So next thing I want to go buy some textbooks and "sorry, only iPad is supported" and I'm forced to buy one, regardless of whether I already own a device that is technically more than capable of reading them.
And you could argue that's not necessarily Apple's fault, but they are very clever at leveraging their entire ecosystem to topple one market after the other in order to create an unhealthy dependence on the brand.
Re:Cutting off your nose... (Score:4, Insightful)
You want your education to be based on older inferior technology, just to spite Apple? Insane.
What? iBooks are just ePub files. They're far from superior to anything we have already -- they ARE what we have already, though without the free and open standards part.
While electronic textbooks are a bit insane to begin with (and in many ways inferior to printed books), why make that worse by locking yourself to a single vendor for hardware, software, and the books? Who in their right mind would want that?
This has nothing to do with spite. It's just common sense.