From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2004-07-11T07:19:24+09:00
Subject: Re: PickAxe 2 licensing


On Jul 10, 2004, at 17:01, Matthew Margolis wrote:
> So in short, if they put a version online and the Ruby community grows 
> enough someone will probably start illegal distribution.  As someone 
> who hopes to one day be published this makes me unhappy but it is the 
> way things seem to work with any sufficiently large community and a 
> copyrighted work.

We sell PDFs of our existing books. Each is personalized with the name 
of the buyer.

We did have someone release the books online. We tracked them down 
using this name, and got the site shut down.

Now, it's not perfect: they'll be people who don't care, or who put 
other people's copies on P2P networks, but in general it seems to be a 
fairly good compromise.

I don't like restricted PDFs: if you buy something, I think you get the 
right to use it.

Cheers

Dave