Howdy fellow Blender artists. Please endure a little rant for a moment.
Just today, I ran across a long-time Blender-head’s (i.e. gives speeches, does demos, is a professional, etc.) blog in which he links to pirated .PDFs of both my own and Tony Mullen’s latest books. I’ve sent an email to this person explaining that, not even getting into the legal aspects of it, I am seriously not cool with him doing that. On the off chance that he “misunderstood” that it was protected content, I’m not going to publish his name and/information here. I’ll save that sort of thing both for my own web space and when I see how he reacts to my removal request.
I wanted to make sure that people understand that, while content produced by the Blender Foundation is generally open under some sort of Creative Commons license, books like the one linked in my sig below and those produced by Tony Mullen (and now Jason van Gumster!) are not open content. We worked our tails off to write those books, and for myself, the only way I’ll be able to devote that kind of time to such a thing again would be if it modestly pays off financially. Pirating that type content is not only wrong, but it reduces the future chances that I’ll write another book.
I know that most of the users here like myself really subscribe to and have an affection for the Free Software philosophy, and a part of that is that we respect the licenses that others assign to their work, regardless of whether we agree with them or not. We wouldn’t want some shady company to get away with GPL violations, just the same as we should respect the more restrictive copyrights that non-free projects choose to assign to their works.
So, if you should run across pirated materials like this – I urge you to ignore them. Better yet, I urge you to explain to the people who think that that sort of thing fits in with the Blender philosophy exactly why it does not.
How can he be a “Blender head” and harm the education of Blender? it’s just only recently that people realized there is some decent education around Blender that’s worth investing time and money into. Wait and see how he responds to your request.
Which is exactly what I said I would do. In the meantime, I’ve just making it clear for everyone that not every tidbit of Blender-related content floating around the world is doing so with an Open license. In case they were mistakenly under that impression.
Even the Blender institute needs money to operate, if you really need the books get what you can from the Blender E-store, the money will go to Ton and the others and fund development of the very program which says you don’t need $$$ to create good quality work.
Man, this is really incredible… In this day and age, they are still people familiar with IT who forget to check copyright issues… :eek: (should I be naive or not?)
By the way, I just let a comment for your book on Amazon (sorry if there are some typos)
Reaally a huge thank for this book, you know it saves me a lot of time!
For the moment I want to keep updated with the “tool” itself, and wait for a storyboard from my brother, so in the mean time I am learning to draw …
take care
Yeah, I can easily imagine it was just a misunderstanding due to the BF’s use of open licenses for their material. I can understand someone getting confused.
Hopefully this will all get resolved without any issue.
(By the way: piracy is cool. Otherwise why did “Pirates of the Caribbean” do so well in theaters? :-P)
Seriously, though, copyright law exists for a reason. And even if its current implementation is totally out of whack with anything even approaching reasonable, it’s still important to follow the basic idea.
Well ranted, harkyman. Hope he responds in a considerate fashion.
Your book, btw, is excellent. I’ve only had it for a week or so, but it’s already got me moving forward on a small animation project I’ve had in mind for a while now. Plus it’s got a lot of workflow reference material I don’t find anywhere else. I would hate for you to discover it doesn’t pay to write another one.
I am sorry for that harkyman. You are the one who puts extreme enthusiasm, time and hard job to provide such excellent knowledge resources. So you definitely deserve the credit (and by credit I also mean credit). Here by I fully understand why this is not open content and this is really shame.
Just one question, if the was not the scanned copy but real PDF from production you should ask your publisher.
We don’t offer a downloadable of the book. I don’t even have a final .PDF of the entire book. The only people who have access to a production .PDF (which this definitely is – I downloaded and analyzed) are the publisher themselves and the printing company. The publisher is a respected technical publisher. The book was printed, however, in China. I know that currently there is a huge problem with Chinese manufacturers who work for your company (Sony, Focal Press, etc.) for two shifts and then work for themselves for a third shift, using off-market parts and labor but your tech/intellectual property/etc. My guess would be that it leaked from the contract printer.
Well one search of a torrent site shows just how bad the problem is. You can download The Creature Factory, Animating With Blender and Bounce, Tumble and Splash, which is obviously out of order.
Blender being free is amazing and one of the main reasons I chose to start learning it. But knowing that by purchasing the books and open project DVDs you are helping to keep the Blender Foundation going is rewarding. I will continue to support the Blender Foundation by buying their products!
China, aha. So this will be the case. I am really sorry. My uncle who is quite respectable photographer in Munich had terrible experiences with Chinese. They ordered quite big order for some products photo-books and never paid. They really does not have any feeling or concept of copyrights.
MrHurst – in the case of Creature Factory, that’s actually legal. I think that’s where the confusion kicks in. Content that comes from the BF is generally open with a CC license. Books like mine and others you’d find on Amazon are not.
Creature Factory & Animating with Blender are both “CC By”, unlike Bounce Tumble and Splash. I bought all three of these anyway though and they have proved worth every penny. The creature factory license is below. License All files and graphical content on this disk is licensed (CC) (BY) to Andreas Goralczyk/Blender Foundation. The soundtrack music for the Creature Factory Teaser is (CC) (BY) to Wavemage Productions/Jan Morgenstern. For an explanation of the license, see Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
I agree that recent books may not be pirated cause the makers live from them!
But for the older books like Loomis and some Preston Blair unprinted I don`t think there some real problem , the authors are dead so no money goes to them.
So if the authors still live buy the book! If it is dead ? and his relatives don`t get any penny why waste your money ?
my thoughts exactly, I have a few ebooks that are not copyrighted, and always end up buying the books anyway, I hate reading textbooks off the screen- that said though there are enough of us in the blender community who respect what people like harkyman are doing that if we see the books available on rapid share, or wherever to report them as copyrighted material.
I agree that recent books may not be pirated cause the makers live from them!