<story><title>Apple&apos;s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539&amp;h=1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>culturestate</author><text>I&apos;ll be honest, I don&apos;t understand this uproar. Apple isn&apos;t marketing iBooks Author as a general-purpose eBook publishing tool, they&apos;re providing it &lt;i&gt;for free&lt;/i&gt; for the &lt;i&gt;express purpose&lt;/i&gt; of publishing to their platform. This is how they describe it on their website:&lt;p&gt;&quot;iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks — and just about any other kind of book — for iPad.&quot;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s why every comparison between iBooks Author and Office or Photoshop or 3DS Max or any other creative application rings so disingenuous in my mind. They&apos;re not even restricting distribution outside of their platform, they just don&apos;t want you making money from it. What evilness am I missing?</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple&apos;s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement</title><url>http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539&amp;h=1</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>extension</author><text>I can&apos;t imagine them defining &quot;Work&quot; so vaguely if they were trying to write a clear contract. More likely Apple wants to wait and let the courts decide how much they can get away with. God knows how that will turn out. I guess either the license will be ruled invalid or some ludicrous precedent will be set.&lt;p&gt;I can&apos;t think of any sensible way to decide whether or not data was &quot;generated by&quot; a piece of software. If you export your book to plain text, is that not &quot;generated by&quot; the app? Why not? It&apos;s the app&apos;s output. But it&apos;s also your own copyrighted work in a more or less rudimentary form.&lt;p&gt;Imagine you first write your book in Apple&apos;s app and save it to an iBook file that falls under Apple&apos;s restrictions. Then you retype your entire book in a 3rd party app that can export iBooks perfectly. The 3rd party generated iBook is bit-for-bit identical to Apple&apos;s. Now you have &quot;two&quot; files that are subject to different licenses, except of course they are the same file.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s already absurd. But what if instead of retyping your book, you just import it into the 3rd party app from the Apple generated iBook file. You should be able to do that, right? Surely the legal status of the data can&apos;t depend on whether or not you typed it by hand. But again, this is absurd because you are importing and exporting to the same format. It optimizes to a file copy.&lt;p&gt;And this isn&apos;t a reductionist argument. The above is an entirely realistic scenario that will inevitably come up whenever an iBook author wants to sell their book outside of Apple&apos;s store.</text></comment>