Sale of "free" stuff on eBay

From: Jim Battle <frustum_at_pacbell.net>
Date: Wed Nov 24 10:14:22 2004

Dave Dunfield wrote:

...
> There was a similar thread a few months back, when one of the guys who maintains a site
> of archived manuals got upset that another guy was including some of "his" manuals on a
> DVD that he was selling for $30 (and gives to anyone who contributes material which is
> how I got it) - Insisting that I download the material prevents me from bring able to
> obtain most of the larger manuals (some of which I would really like to get). - Really
> annoying, considering that he doesn't have permission from most of the original authors,
> and claims to be preserving them and "making them available" ... but apparently only to
> the "high-speed" elite (but again I rant :-)

If you are referring to the same thread that I recall, I think you have
it wrong. The listmember helps maintain a site of manuals and other
information. When he found that dynacomp was including his work without
  having asked permission not having given any references to where he
got the information, the listmember decided to sell a DVD with a
superset of all the information -- the difference being that in his
auction, he clearly stated that all of the information was available on
the net and he'd provide the URLs for all of it free for the asking --
he was very explicit in stating that what he was selling was the
convenience of not having to download and categorize everything.

As I recall it, that person got roasted pretty completely on this list
for what was perceived as too high of a price, despite the fact that his
DVD had more information than the 6 CD's that dynacomp is selling on
ebay which collectively cost way more than the DVD.

Personally, I have invested much more than 1000 hours in my sol work,
maybe 2000 hours -- both the emulator and in scanning and in many cases
meticulously OCR'ing and reformatting the documents so they'd be
searchable and faster to download. For example, in those old proc tech
newsletters they'd often list an assembly language program. OCR'ing
that was tough, but I didn't stop there -- I would clean it up the best
I could, then I'd assemble it and make sure that the hex produced by the
assembler matched the hex that appeared in the listing. I don't have
the time anymore to be that anal about it.

On just about all of the documents on my site I'm violating somebody's
copyright, and I'm more than willing to pull anything from my site that
the original author doesn't want on there, but so far none have (and a
few have been tickled to see their work kept alive).

Dynacomp (Fred Ruckdeschel) irritates me, mostly because of his sneaky
ebay dealings from a few years back (he had a shill bidder on his
auctions and I caught him red handed). He may have been in business for
a long time, but it doesn't have to mean he is ethical.

A piece of me is irritated that dynacomp stands to make money on my and
others efforts. A lot of his volume 6 comes from my sol site. Taken in
whole, though, I can't complain about copyright issues considering that
most of what I've scanned has someone else's copyright imprint on it. I
went to the bother to scan and organize my web site to preserve the
information. This guy is another vector of dissemination.

Finally, in the things that I have OCR'd, I usually put something like
"Copyright (c) 1977 Processor Techonology" or whatever in the PDF
properties when I write out the PDF, but I also include "scanned and
OCR'd by Jim Battle". Some of the people who in the past have
complained about borrowing work uncredited are hosting some of my
documents as evidenced by the PDF tag above, yet they didn't ask me
about it.

The bits want to be free.
Received on Wed Nov 24 2004 - 10:14:22 GMT