[cc-community] selling book rights, and CC-BY-SA

Chris Watkins chriswaterguy at appropedia.org
Tue Jul 14 05:26:13 EDT 2009


I just got an email from one of our partners. They're sharing their work
under CC-BY-SA - we suggested it, and their publisher happily went along
with it. I was surprised they agreed so readily, but we do know the
publisher is very progressive.

Now we just got an email: the publisher has been reading through the licence
and are concerned about how it affects their ability to sell rights for the
book overseas..  why would a publisher in, say, Korea buy the book when they
could just download and publish?

It seems to me that this is a completely valid concern - a CC-BY-SA license
makes it unsellable internationally. The only thing I can suggest, if they
do have any expectation of selling the rights, is that they restrict their
work with an NC clause and do it on their own wiki or subwiki.

To be honest, I'm not a fan of the NC license as it's normally used, but the
restriction could be softened a bit:

   - Add a notice that the work will be released under CC-BY-SA after (say)
   5 years, in addition to the NC license.
   - Release segments of the book and/or the older version of the book under
   CC-BY-SA. This is less commercially desirable material than the latest work
   by the author, but still enormously valuable to a wiki like ours, and helps
   spread awareness of this author and his work.

Any other ideas? Or is there something I've missed about the CC-BY-SA
license?

Another idea, if the author take the NC route: We could continue to allow
people to make additions to the book on our wiki, but add a notice saying
that these pages are under a dual license: CC-BY-NC-SA as well as the wiki's
default CC-BY-SA. That way, the author could choose from these additions to
use in his own work. This has the advantage of being a bit complex, but does
allow for better sharing. (Using just CC-BY is the other option, but I think
we're more comfortable with the Share Alike clause.)

Feedback appreciated!
-- 
Chris Watkins

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

identi.ca/appropedia / twitter.com/appropedia
blogs.appropedia.org

I like this: five.sentenc.es
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