[cc-community] selling book rights, and CC-BY-SA
jonathon
jonathon.blake at gmail.com
Wed Jul 15 11:41:01 EDT 2009
On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 12:30, drew Roberts wrote:
>> 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?
What rights did the original publisher think they were buying?
>> 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.
> Why would the publisher pay the authors in the first place? What prevents them from making use of the BY-SA license locally and not paying the authors?
If the original content was CC-BY-SA licensed (any version), then
there is nothing preventing that Korean, or even local publisher (to
the company that paid for publication rights )from printing, and
distributing the work.
> What is special about the internation situation?
My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the publisher thought that
they were buying either "worldwide publication rights", or "first
publishing rights". In either instance, the typical publisher
expectation is that they get to negotiate with other publishers.
> Why would the publisher pay in the local market when other local publishers can print and sell copies without paying the authors monies?
> I think answering this may shed some further light on the issue.
> (Asking out of ignorance...) In the book business, is it normal for the author to sell the publisher worldwide rights and the publisher to then sub-sell those rights to various regions?
Up until roughly fifteen years ago, that was standard operating
procedure. A number of smaller publishing houses still work that way.
> Or is it normal for the author to sell regional rights around the world?
For authors in either niche fields, and extremely popular fiction
authors, that has become standard operating procedure in the last
fifteen years.
> How are authors going to convince their readers to purchase BY-SA (or BY) works from sources where the authors get some income rather than from sources where the authors get no revenue?
Personalization: Autographed and inscribed copies being one example.
jonathon
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