On 2006-07-30 18:54:39 -0400, "Matt Lichtenberg" <kerobaros@gmail.com> said:
Well, I hate to volunteer the community, but if we all worked together to create a higher-quality PDF or similar clone of the manual.. what would the legalities be surrounding that? Would the people who've already bought a copy from you be entitled to a copy of the higher-quality version? Would it become community property? Would it be legal in the first place?
Well, it couldn't be community property as the copyright still falls under Apple's control. I would certainly be willing to provide high-quality prints at cost to anyone that previously bought a copy, though.
The problem is that the act of creating a new copy of the document results in a nice copy floating around out there outside the license that exists, which would be a huge problem legally for me.
Again, would it be possible to recreate these in some form from the copies that the community has, and do the same as I mentioned for the //c book?
Possibly, although we'd have to figure out a way such that there aren't PDFs floating around in the wild. I don't want Apple to come along and pull my license. Although they might not care, I don't think anyone's likely to want to take that chance either. :)
I have a single-sided auto-feeding scanner here, as well as appropriate software to do the scanning and even OCR. I'd be happier doing the scanning with a duplex scanner, but they're pretty expensive.
The biggest problem is that my masters aren't very good. They're scans of photocopies of the original books (or in some cases, scans of photocopies of photocopies...). APDA and Byte Works and the like used to just send them through copy machines to make copies for sale. Ah, the olden days, before scanners and PDFs.
What I'd sort of like to be able to do is find spare copies of the books that can be broken up and scanned from scratch. That would let me run off new copies with much better quality.
Therein lies the difficulty: finding copies of all these books that people wouldn't mind having dismantled for scanning.
I have spare copies of one or two of the books, but not of them all. Any suggestions on getting copies of the rest (particularly, copies that don't have messed-up or marked-on pages)?
Sheppy