I recently stumbled upon one of these sites. Assuming it was legit, I answered a perlmonk question by linking to a relevant Cookbook recipe. I included a "p.s." asking if the site was really authorized to use the bookshelf that way. After learning that it was indeed *NOT* sanctioned usage by O'Reilly, I promptly removed the links.

I'm a fence sitter on this one as well... Perhaps because it is so similiar to the IP battles that the music industry is currently going through. I certainly wouldn't give up my copy of the Cookbook even if the entire contents was available online for free. Perhaps it would even encourage more people to buy the book (cause it is a damn good book!!!)

It's hard to compare O'Reilly with the IP Warlords of the music industry, so perhaps that isn't really fair. I suppose its immaterial either way. O'Reilly doesn't want you to do it, and it was their dime (and authors' sweat) that made the book a reality. If they discourage that type of usage, who am I to disagree.

-Blake

In reply to Re: Software piracy- what would you do? by blakem
in thread Software piracy- what would you do? by scottstef

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.