jaerdaph said:Well, you should probably be consulting an intellectual property lawyer then instead of asking on a message board where everyone and their brother will have an opinion, correct or not.
Speaking of which this subject, especially with regard to PDF publishing, has been covered ad nauseum here at EN World before. Perhaps you should do a search of the forums and find an existing thread and read what others have had to say on the subject already. Those threads included input and insight from lawyers and publishers as well.
yes.. that's pretty much a given it's still nice to hear what people are thinking though.. on the issue of search.. I don't at present have a membership so can't use the enworld search. If you search through google even just targeting enword you get a million hits for pdf and printing. I did read a thread a while back talking about this. However it mostly talked about problems getting things printed at Kinkos etc. Some publishers also jumped it and talked about giving written permissions for people to print. But like I said that was a while back which is why I said recently in the first question. I wanted to see if there had been any changes in this area and if publishers had started putting permissions to print in there material. I also don't remember reading anything dealing with my further questions. The whole 4th ed got me thinking about this again because of the whole pdf thing there. If you read blogs like http://www.teleread.org/blog/ you will see alot of talk about ebooks etc. Someone above pointed to the enworld faq. This mostly deals with what they sell and DRM concerns. DRM is not the way to deal with this. I don't buy cds for exactly that reason. DRM blocks customers and doesn't work. Neither does watermarking, they are both neat ideas but anything semi popular that comes out will instantly be up stripped of both. All it does it irritate paying customers. DRM that says so many activations is a rental in disguise you can no longer use it after you go through a number of computers or reinstalls. It is not always supported on the platforms you want to use it on and any one type of DRM may stop being suported by devices at some point in the future. Stripping the DRM is considered a criminal activity in at least some places (even for fair use purposes). Part of the question then becomes do publishers want to not have potential customers or make them into criminals becuase they download things illegally so they don't have to deal with the DRM or by requiring them to strip the DRM from the material to use it how and where they want. This discussion keeps coming up because there is a need for it.
Sorry for the rant this is more off topic from where I wanted to go. I would rather this topic say to the questions I started with rather than the problems with DRM (though I guess it's necessary as well). I don't have a solution and realize people here may not have exact answers but the industry is moving more and more toward print on demand types of solutions. Discussions by the users and publishers (input by those in the legal profession is necessary as well) can help move things toward a place that is good for both publishers and users. It's much better to do this now rather than push things as far as the recording industry has and end up with lots of hard feelings on all sides.
