[cc-community] Switching my book to a CC licence?

Greg London email at greglondon.com
Sat Dec 1 10:07:18 EST 2007


CC-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives would probably be the
creative commons license that is probably closest to yours.

The one difference would be that the NonCommercial
clause allows people to charge some money if it
isn't primarily for profit or the primary draw for
the site. As an example, I believe that your current
license would prohibit a University from turning
your work into a textbook and selling it, because they
would have to "charge" for it. Your license allows
them to use it in their course, and it allows them
to distribute at no cost, and it allows students to
pass it around as long as they don't "charge".
But your license wouldn't allow them to charge for
a copy of the work itself.

The CC-NC license would allow someone to charge for
a copy of the work as long as it wasn't primarily a
for profit transaction.

Yes, that's exceedingly fuzzy. There are rather complicated
flowchart diagrams floating around somewhere that try to
explain what is and is not commercial. But since there
are folks who occaisionally show up here upset because they
misunderstood what the NC license allows, it seems that
it should be pointed out.

depending on what  you're trying to accomplish,
CC-NC is probably fine for your work.
I just don't want any unexpected surprises down the
road to cause problems for you because you didn't
know about it.

Greg

> Since many years I distribute my 1500 page free physics text
> (see http:// www.motionmountain.net ) under the following
> licence:
>
> The text is free. It is a physics ebook in pdf format. You can
> print a copy of the pdf file(s) for yourself, you can store any
> number of copies of the file(s) on your computer(s), you can
> distribute the file(s) in unmodified form, and, of course, you
> can lend your printout to others or use it in teaching.
> However, you are not allowed to charge money for anything
> containing any part of this text; it was and remains free for
> everybody to read, to print for personal use, and to store
> and distribute electronically in unmodified form.
>
>
> Is this roughly equivalent to the
>
> Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
>
> licence? Should/can I switch? Thank you for any hint!
>
> Christoph Schiller
>
>
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