Jimmy Wales wrote:
Timwi wrote:
This is assuming that the larger part of the cost of textbooks is copyright licenses. I would imagine that it is instead the production costs of actual books, and obviously free content won't help that.
I agree that it would be very helpful to us to have a better understanding of the tradeoffs but I also wanted to point out that it's a bit more complex than just copyright license + cost of production here.
Our work is free-as-in-beer but also free-as-in-speech. So the point is not _just_ that a potential producer of paper texts saves on the cost of copyright licensing but also....
- They don't need to get permission from anyone at all, they can just
get started in any small and tiny way they see fit (or in any large and mass-produced way they see fit)
- There can be many competitors in a market ecosystem of provision of
content, rather than a single licensee attempting to capture some monopoly rents
I think that we are already well on the way to dealing with the copyright issues. The free-as-in-speech will probably need to be dealt with one jurisdiction at a time.
To-day's off-the-shelf Microsoft product does not come with the huge array of manuals that would have come with its ten-year old counterpart. Instead we need to make do with electronic files that are nowhere near as useful as a book that you can hold in your hand and leaf through. Reducing production costs has a clear effect on the Microsoft bottom line.
Whether we or a downstream user converts the material to a paper product the production costs will always be there. Simply clarifying permissions is still a long way from getting the material to those who need it most. Any producer will at least want to see its costs covered.
Ec