RFC: Idea: A Book about Perl Humour

Hi all,

What do you people say about writing a book titled "Perl Humour" where we=20
collect the best of the online humour about Perl? (both for, against, relat=
ed=20
to and in NPOV of Perl.) We can donate something like 50% of the proceeding=
s=20
to the TPF, and also eventually publish the book online.

The motivation for that idea came to me when, during dinner, my family=20
suggested that I write some E-books for Amazon.com and similar E-book shops=
=20
and sell them there (for the Kindle, etc.). Then I thought about these page=
s=20
and others which contain a lot of Perl humour from the online world:

* http://perl.net.au/wiki/Perl_Humour

* http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/

* http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Larry_Wall

So we can prepare an E-book of it, and possibly end up preparing a paperwar=
e=20
version, while also eventually making the sources (in whatever format we=20
choose) available under one of the Creative Commons licences. I volunteer t=
o=20
take this forward (in exchange for getting a percentage of the payment per=
=20
copy), but would like to know what you people think about it.

Some issues:

1. Violation of one's copyrights: we may need to ask permission from all th=
e=20
sources, and in the case of IRC conversations, where there are many random=
=20
nicks (who are possibly not on IRC), this can be a huge problem. I think=20
there's some amount of fair use that allows it, but IANAL.

2. Trademarks: I think the general law about trademarks is that one cannot=
=20
prevent any and all use of them, just when one suspects that they may be=20
confused with a different product which may lead to purchase fraud. So for=
=20
example I can say "I think that O'Reilly Media=E2=84=A2's books suck due to=
 X, Y, Z."=20
without infringing on their trademark, but I cannot say something like "The=
=20
book 'Mastering cat' by O'Reilly Media which I wrote is available for purch=
ase=20
on my online store.".=20

So it shouldn't be a problem if we mention some people's trademark, and=20
naturally, the right of parody also applies to trademarks.

3. Defamation / Misquoting - some people may object to quoting their names,=
=20
nicknames or handles (I've been bitten by it a few times.). One option woul=
d=20
be to "anonymise" them and use generic meta-syntactic names (say from the=20
Bible, Shakespeare, the Greek Mythology, etc.) instead. We can try asking o=
f=20
course, because some people would want the publicity.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

=2D-=20
=2D----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
My Aphorisms - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour.html

Larry Wall gets the colon.

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