Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Jump to bottom

Crack down on copyright infringement PDFs #1769

Closed
onebree opened this issue Dec 31, 2015 · 27 comments
Closed

Crack down on copyright infringement PDFs #1769

onebree opened this issue Dec 31, 2015 · 27 comments

Comments

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor

onebree commented Dec 31, 2015

Related to #1683

I feel we need to crack down on these types of documents, which are mainly PDFs

https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books/blob/42908b8c92135a765e7bbc9a70979d707f91a8f0/free-programming-books.md#competitive-programming

Copyright included:

Therefore, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, scanning, uploading to any information
storage and retrieval system.
@onebree onebree changed the title Copyright infringement - competitive programming Crack down on copyright infringement PDFs Dec 31, 2015
@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Dec 31, 2015

Definitely. I'm 100% with you. We need to get rid of these. What's the best strategy?

Checking manually every PDF? Could we somehow split the work?

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Dec 31, 2015

Given that tomorrow (New Year's Day) is a holiday and I am off, I can definitely check some PDFs myself. I think the best thing to do is to add to @borgified's script, checking for *.pdf, dbcontent, etc.

Not all PDFs are saved correctly to allow text-searching, so it just has to be done manually.

I do try to help when I see new submissions for the English files, and will take this extra step if it is a PDF.

@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Dec 31, 2015

Great, thanks a bunch! I check carefully every new submission but we have a lot of backlog...

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

The pdf link singled out here is NOT infringing anyone's copyright. It is posted on the author's open website. What the all rights reserved means in this context is you mustn't host the file on another website. You have an implied license to download it and read it, and to link to it, because that's clearly the intent of the rights holder.

You'd be amazed at the number of books advertised as "Open Access" that get scary copyright statements added because no reason.

I review almost all of the english-language book links that get added here, and, while I'm not a lawyer, I can say that it's a pretty tight ship, no reason for alarm.

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Dec 31, 2015

@eshellman thank you for clarifying that! As you pointed out, they do sound scary, and betterr be safe than sorry!

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 4, 2016

I forgot to post my findings over the weekend! I am no expert in licensing, so the list may include harmless items.

Here they are, English only, before programming languages

@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Jan 4, 2016

Many thanks! It will take me quite some time to handle all of these.

I took a random link from "possibly" : http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf and it took some digging to find this : "it's now out of print, if you click on the second link you can download a copy" on the book's author webpage... Checking all these will be a long process I guess. :)

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 4, 2016

Yep, this will definitely take a while. What are your thoughts on documents that just sy "Copyright" or © ? I did not do a text search for any terms -- just checked the first few and last few pages.

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

I'll look through these (slowly) but just looking at the urls...
anything from arxiv.org is cool.
I've previously verified the Open license for the fsf book- "Free as in Freedom". Also Art of Community. Competitive programming is the book I mentioned in this thread.

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 5, 2016

@eshellman I will cross-out the ones you mentioned are good when I have the chance. :-)

@borgified
Copy link
Contributor

I keep trying to find an automated solution, this is what I found after a
bit of searching. It's not the complete answer I don't think it'll straight
up tell us if a book is free or not but I think it is a start.

https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
On Jan 4, 2016 4:20 PM, "Hunter Stevens" notifications@github.com wrote:

@eshellman https://github.com/eshellman I will cross-out the ones you
mentioned are good when I have the chance. :-)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#1769 (comment)
.

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf is CC BY-NC-SA per the author's website.

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/~mike/zrm/zrm.pdf Copyright © J. M. Spivey, 1988, 1992, 2001.

from http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/~mike/zrm/
"The Z Reference Manual has now been allowed to go out of print by the publisher, Prentice Hall, but they have kindly returned the copyright to me, so I can make the full text available here."

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 8, 2016

That's interesting, you have the copyright now? What will it be, CC?

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/QAI/qai.pdf
from http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/ (author's webpage)
"A free online web version of this book is available at: http://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/QAI/qai.pdf. Its pagination is different than that of the print version, but the web version has the advantage that its web links are clickable."

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

http://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/lnoa.pdf
http://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/poa.pdf
These are hosted on author's website: http://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/
The license agreement in the files says
"If you wish to provide access to this work in either print or electronic form, you may do so by providing a link to, and/or listing the URL for the online version of this license agreement: http://hercule.csci.unt.edu/ian/books/free/license.html . You may not link to the PDF file."

Of course, the specified url does not exist, but the license can be found at https://larc.unt.edu/ian/books/free/license.html

This sort of license can't be enforced - if so, Google would be infringing. However, for the purposes of FPB, I suggest the url be changed to the (corrected) license url, perhaps with a note to use the drop down menu. Meanwhile, I will reach out to the author and the library at his university, suggesting that other strategies may be more effective.

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 8, 2016

@eshellman some questions

  1. What link should we then submit for the zrm files?
  2. What about the LNOA/POA books?

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

@onebree for zrm the link we have is fine. (the quote is from the author)
Will submit a PR to change LNO/POA links.

eshellman added a commit to eshellman/free-programming-books that referenced this issue Jan 12, 2016
@eshellman
Change links to comply with author request
dc9d930 
Ian Parberry, the author, requests that links point to a license page
leading to his books rather than directly to pdf. See
EbookFoundation#1769 (comment)
70046046
@eshellman eshellman mentioned this issue Jan 12, 2016
Merged
@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Jan 17, 2016

* [Free as in Freedom](https://archive.org/details/faif-2.0) (PDF) I suggest we keep this one.

@onebree I took the liberty to edit your awesome list to cross a few items!

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

I think it would be useful to have the urls to check in a PR so that we can comment on them line by line.

@onebree
Copy link
Contributor Author

onebree commented Jan 18, 2016

@eshellman what do you mean by that? In new PRs, or a PR in respect to this post?

@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Jan 18, 2016

Good idea @eshellman.
@onebree A PR removing all these links such that we can comment directly on the commit whenever we find a link we should keep.

I'll do this PR as soon as I get home.

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

or, easier, a PR (which never needs to be accepted) with a file check_copyright containing the urls to check

@vhf vhf mentioned this issue Jan 18, 2016
Closed
@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Jan 18, 2016

Good idea, even better. Let's talk over there. #1799

@vhf vhf closed this as completed Jan 18, 2016
@vhf vhf reopened this Jan 23, 2016
@vhf
Copy link
Member

vhf commented Jan 23, 2016

If anyone speaks a foreign language and wants to check a file for copyright infringement, please do!

@ruben-ar14-mons
Copy link
Contributor

ruben-ar14-mons commented Jul 3, 2016 •
edited

Side note: In some files C, C Sharp and C++ might be in the wrong "order"; travis won´t like it

@eshellman
Copy link
Collaborator

I think we're clean. Thanks everyone. File a new issue id there are new concerns.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Assignees
No one assigned
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Milestone
No milestone
Development

No branches or pull requests
7 participants
@eshellman @borgified @vhf @ruben-ar14-mons @onebree and others