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Comment by greyman | Hacker News Reader

Good for him, he is quite brave regarding how much he uncopyrighted. But still, I checked just now and - correct me if I am wrong - not all his books are free, for example "The Little Guide to Un-Procrastination". Also, he is selling courses.

As I understand it, he is selling some products, and uncopyrighted some others for marketing purposes. Interestingly, some people will pay also for those works which are uncopyrighted. Still, it isn't the case that everything he offers is free and can be paid only voluntarily.

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Free and uncopyrighted are different things. The author didn't claim the books were free.

But by giving up his right as an author to decide how his work is copied and distributed, he has no way of enforcing that. Instead he relies solely on the goodness of his "customers" hearts. Most open source licenses understands this and keep a final say in how the work can be used, for example.

Agreed. His uncopyrighted books are basically marketing for his paid courses, so yeah, getting rid of copyright can work well in such a scenario where you just want to reach a big audience.

For more niche books with only a small and professional audience i dont think it would work.

I have been following his blog since the beginning and I can tell you when he went the uncopyright route he wasn't selling courses. He started doing it only recently, he might have written commercial books though. I found one of his book on torrent site when googling for review (google didn't penalize pirate search results during that time) and emailed him about it. He basically said he doesn't care and pointed me to his uncopyright page.

I charge for pretty much all my products, including books and courses (except the blog, which is free). They are all uncopyrighted. Somehow, I still make a living.

So no hits in Google? Even if it isn't free, you can buy it and put it up on the Internet for everyone to download.

Uncopyrighted != free. The first thing he says in the statement is: "If people buy my ebook...".

Nothing can ever be free if you use the logic that "People are allowed to donate in support of my work"

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