From: Matthew Margolis <mrmargolis@...>
Date: 2004-07-11T07:31:46+09:00
Subject: Re: PickAxe 2 licensing

Dave Thomas wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
I like that approach.  It isn't foolproof but it is a pain to get 
around.  As I said above, for large all out piracy to happen the Ruby 
community would have to be a lot bigger so that statistically there 
would be more shady types who don't mind ripping people off.  I guess 
the best parallel would be the music industry.  Only a small group of 
people are ripping CDs but there are enough that wide scale sharing can 
occur.
I agree with you about not using restricted PDFs for sold ebooks.  It is 
such an inconvenience for your legitimate customers.

In any case, I look forward to your upcoming books.  I will probably  
purchase both a paper and digital copy if version 2 is half as good as 
version 1.

Sincerely,
Matthew Margolis

P.S.  I am rereading The Pragmatic Programmer right now and wanted thank 
you for creating such a beautiful resource.