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Comment by sfk | Hacker News Reader

Well, he funds scribd, which has a substantial amount of illegal content. I don't think he should complain.

Hum, you could as well have said:"he's an internet entrepreneur, and internet is choke full of illegal content, so he shouldn't complain".

Just because he funds a website that doesn't tightly monitor what is submitted does not mean it is ok to freely distribute his work without permission. That being said, the articles are already available for free on his website, but I do not see a license on them.

Agreed - I have no desire to piss off pg considering the value his ideas have provided to me over the years. I considered keeping the collection private because of the copyright issue but one of his essays mentions that they're looking for people for their YC companies who are willing to push the envelope a bit :) Also, I thought about emailing him first but he says he's not responding to emails until September. (All not excuses I know).

That being said, I do wonder where the line is and will be drawn in the coming years. The ePub artifact itself may be controversial (not really sure) but I'm pretty sure I could distribute the code that generates the ePub or create a page that says "click this button to generate the ePub download" and have legal precedent on my side (from the VCR cases and since there isn't any DMCA workaround I'd have to get through for the content).

I recently saw on startuplessonslearned that they're selling their blog content for 29.99 (more than worth it IMO) but at the same time, their target audience could easily circumvent the need to do it either through instapaper, writing their own script or any other myriad of ways.

Sure, Eric is selling his blog content on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com/startuplessonslearned), but the key difference is that Eric asked us to do it, and he's getting money :).

And of course someone could get around the need to pay $29.99 by writing a script, but if you value your time at all it wouldn't be worth it.

We think it's a good deal for Eric (he makes money from something he has given away for free) and a good deal for the reader (it's much more pleasant to read a PDF than to click through posts in a web browser, and even more pleasant to read it on a Kindle.).

Agreed (I mentioned that it was worth it and I enjoy getting well-formatted eBooks as compared to instapapering everything).

My main point was that e-publishing seems like a tough business since the trend of information pricing seems to be heading to 0.

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