Development of Creative Commons licenses

[James Grimmelmann <james.grimmelmann AT yale.edu>]

At 04:32 PM 6/22/2004, Greg London wrote:

> Evan Prodromou said:
> > If I had my own bookbinding machine ...
>
> You do. It's called http://www.lulu.com
> Actually, its a book binding and order fullfilment machine...
> You need a PDF with fonts embedded, but it can be done.
> My "Impatient Perl" book is available through Lulu
> and it didn't cost me any money up front.
>
> Course, with a CC-NC license, I'm not sure if it would be cool
> to leave it up on Lulu, even if you charged no royalty, since lulu
> would still be making money on it. You'd probably have to upload,
> order one copy for yourself, and then remove the book so no one
> else purchases it. Not sure about that one.

Yeah.  It's revealing that Lulu is a publication service for authors, not a 
book production service for readers.


> yes. NC is a market economy license. the point is free advertising,
> free samples, to make the original author money. The idea of NC is
> to give up some non-commercial rights in exchange for word of mouth
> and a few actual sales. The idea is to bypass the "machine" that is
> the massive book publishing industry (or music industry, or insert
> industry of choice here) and to allow artists and authors a channel
> to get distribution and advertising with no money up front. But the
> point is for the author/artist to make money.

Right.  I think that's a fair description of one constituency.  Not sure I 
agree with you that NonCommercial isn't a good choice for others, and I'm 
not sure I agree with you that this group wouldn't want the copy shop to 
make copies of it for people.  But this strikes me as a good way of 
describing the motivations of many would-be NC users.

Thanks!

James,
Not a lawyer.  Not speaking for CC.