Tuesday, October 15, 2002

helpful responses from Jon Udell and Sean Devine #

Yesterday, I ranted about how my account was unfairly locked out on Safari (an online book service that involves O'Reilly and Associates among other publishers).  I sent my post to Tim O'Reilly, Jon Udell, and the technical customer support people at Safari.  This morning, I received thoughtful, engaging, and respectful email from Jon Udell (who architected Safari) and Sean Devine (the Managing Director of Safari Books Online).  They wrote about the challenges of building a system that lets users really use the books well while keeping the books from being spidered and distributed en masseto the world.  It seems that how Acrobat is treated per se remains an open question.  I hope that I'll get to use it to interact with Safari materials soon enough once a way is found to distinguish between "fair use" usage of Acrobat and "spidering en masse" In the long-term, I wonder how effective technical solution will be.  I get the sense that we need to apply some ideas that we learned from people such as Bruce Schneier.  (I referred to a profile of Schneier in August.)  Basically, solid security depends on people.  I've been thinking a lot about fair use works in the academy, where there is a huge sanction against plagiarism combined with a deep emphasis on sharing and "fair use".  People are allowed to borrow other people's ideas and are, in fact, encouraged to do so.  Part of the bargain, however, is an honor code in which participants are supposed to make good-faith efforts to credit sources of their ideas and data.  That honor code is a heavy-duty part of the socialization of academics and students.  And the punishment for breaking it is very severe.  For the most part, I think the system works to ensure proper crediting happens and stuff doesn't get "stolen" outright.  It's not perfect by any means -- and people are trying to rig up technical solutions to counter student plagiarism, for example.  Note, however, how much the academic system dependes on the social networks in place, the sense of ethics among individuals, the balance of interests.  Not much technology overall. How might these ideas play in the world of Safari.  I'd like to believe that the big part of O'Reilly's customer base have a honor code not unlike the academic one.  They appreciate the risks that O'Reilly has taken in putting the materials out there and do not want to take advantage of the situation.  They want to play fair and honor the terms of service in both the letter of the law and, more importantly, the spirit of it.  They don't want to support people ripping O'Reilly materials and redistributing them for free.  (Hence, it's not surprising that Safari customers will report violations of the TOS.)  Sure, many of the Safari customers might be on the "open source" side of things and hope/lobby for less restrictive/more open ways of sharing quality computer literature such as O'Reilly books.  Some may actually fundamentally disgree with the whole notion of "intellectual property" to begin with.  But how many will actively spider the site and redistribute O'Reilly materials?  Maybe more than I'm naively aware of.  How much are sales being hurt by such people?  Is it incumbent on those of us who are O'Reilly customers to help set a culture in which the illegal redistribution of O'Reilly copyrighted materials is unacceptable  (that is, we won't redistribute materials ourselves or use those materials or do business with those who do.)  Just a thought....   Posted by Raymond Yee on 10/15/02; 11:57:21 AM from the Web Technology dept. Discuss