[cc-community] How to apply a Creative Commons license to an existing book

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Fri May 16 11:36:02 EDT 2008


Jon Andersen wrote:
> Is there someone within the reach of this email who has done this
> before?  Applied a CC license to an existing real-life book without
> republishing it?  I'm trying to reach a local copyright lawyer, but
> that seems like overkill considering that to apply a CC license to a
> new work is a copy-and-paste operation for the copyright owner.  Why
> should it be so difficult for an existing work?

There's nothing difficult about it at all. You just need to:

1) Find out who owns the copyright now

2) Get them to sign a statement that says:

"I hereby release this work under the terms of the X license, signed, ..."

For CC licenses, you should also include a statement like "For the
purposes of attribution, please use the following text ..."

AFAIK, that's it. Done. Finito. No problem.

The problem, in as much as you have one, is that you seemed to have some
uncertainty about who the copyright owner was. In which case, you
_could_ just resolve the issue by getting all possible owners to sign
the document.

What we were discussing was whether you even needed to do this, in light
of the fact that the material appears to just be a list of facts. But
even if that is so, using a CC license on it will cover the bases. You
might even want to consider something like CC0 that would make it
effectively public domain, since the material is probably public domain
to begin with.

Cheers,
Terry

(though of course, I am not a lawyer... etc)
-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com



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