Create new versions/formats of Free Culture

Continuing the discussion from Discover the "truth" of copyright:

I tried downloading it in the various formats provided, but most of the links are dead, including the torrent file.

As I will be reading this, I’m going to also create a version I’d prefer.

Quest is complete when this entire book is available.

Haha, I started working on this, and realized I ought to read the license text for, ahem, BY-NC-1.0. :roll_eyes:

https://allthe.codes/maiki/free-culture/src/branch/main/LICENSE

c. If you distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally
perform the Work or any Derivative Works or Collective Works, You must keep
intact all copyright notices for the Work and give the Original Author credit
reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing by conveying the name
(or pseudonym if applicable) of the Original Author if supplied; the title
of the Work if supplied; in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying
the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., “French translation of the
Work by Original Author,” or “Screenplay based on original Work by Original
Author”). Such credit may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided,
however, that in the case of a Derivative Work or Collective Work, at a minimum
such credit will appear where any other comparable authorship credit appears
and in a manner at least as prominent as such other comparable authorship
credit.

Looks like I’ll be including all that crappy copyright scare text from the book publisher.

Copyright, folks!

The most difficult part of reading Lessig is hearing Lessig read it in my head. It isn’t that I dislike Lessig’s voice, it’s just, gah, how many talks have I listened to to get this cadence stuck in my head… :dizzy_face:

I’m not sure how I’m going to present the book online yet, but I’ve converted the preface: https://allthe.codes/maiki/free-culture/src/branch/main/preface.md

Essentially, I’ll be reading this book a few times, as I convert it. :slight_smile:

Free Culture has a funky outline. It is roughly:

  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • Piracy
    1. Creators
    2. Mere Copyists
    3. Catalogs
    4. Pirates
      • Film
      • Recorded Music
      • Radio
      • Cable TV
    5. Piracy
      • Piracy I
      • Piracy II
  • Property
    6. Founders
    7. Recorders
    8. Transformers
    9. Collectors
    10. Property
    • Why Hollywood is Right
    • Beginnings
    • Law: Duration
    • Law: Scope
    • Law and Architecture
    • Architecture and Law
    • Market: Concentration
    • Together
  • Puzzles
    11. Chimera
    12. Harms
    • Constraining Creators
    • Constraining Innovators
    • Corrupting Citizens
  • Balances
    13. Eldred
    14. Eldred II
  • Conclusion
  • Afterword
  • Notes
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index

The numbered items are chapters. Some of the “sections” have their own lead-in text, but “Puzzles” does not…

Thinking on it, as web documents, it might make the most sense to create documents based on those sections, with the chapters are sub-headings. :thinking:

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I’ve decided I’m going to handle the footnotes last, and incorporate them into metadata and link from a reference section when rendered.

The first two references are to New York Times, and I made these very pretty markup blocks for them:

<blockquote cite="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/30/books/don-t-just-chat-do-something.html">
<p>Unlike actual law, Internet software has no capacity to punish. It doesn’t affect people who aren’t online (and only a tiny minority of the world population is). And if you don’t like the Internet’s system, you can always flip off the modem.</p>
	<footer>
		David Pogue, <cite>Don't Just Chat, Do Something</cite>
	</footer>
</blockquote>

And while that is hot, it is also useless:

  1. Browsers don’t read the cite attribute from blockquotes, and
  2. nytimes.com is not an ethical website, and
  3. How many folks need that data presented as a link?

I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet, but it doesn’t matter at the moment. :slight_smile:

Lawrence Lessing is not Lawrence Lessig. The former’s last name has an “n”.

Here’s what I’m going to try: create discrete documents, and begin reading them after the base markdown conversion is done. Then, in a #mediaclub topic, as I marginalize my thoughts (:rofl:), I’ll also notice errors upon closer examination, as well as calling out references and noting how they could integrate with the document.

I’m going to link to the git repo, it renders markdown okay; later I’ll update links to point to the live web archive.

Oh, so I was looking at Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org), which is just a fascinating project, and was thinking of producing Free Culture using the se-tools, and playing with the Standard Ebooks OPDS server I loaded up Foliate and noticed it is included by default (!), but also the OPDS from Feedbooks, and the latest book offered is Free Culture…

So I downloaded that, and will just read it. :slight_smile:

https://www.feedbooks.com/book/2750

I was a little bummed, since I had really planned out a lot for converting this, but then there is always… Wanted Ebooks - Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover. :sunglasses: