Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Patrick Costello <crisfield AT funkyseagull.com>]

on 11/14/04 5:28 AM, Daniel Carrera at dcarrera AT math.umd.edu wrote:

> In practice, this is just like the current system.  Except that it now has
> a CC license.  So, my question is, is this legally ok?  If not, can
> someone suggest an alternative?


"Legally ok?" Yeah, I guess.

If she is copyrighting the work before she gives away the .pdf files the
only thing a CC license will really do is give her a little bit of legal
boilerplate to outline what parts of her copyright she is and isn't
enforcing. 

Saying, "if you buy this book I'll give it to you under this CC license" is
kind of missing the whole point. Part of the idea with CC is that you are
throwing the material into the internet for people to use. It's not a sales
tool in the sense that a person pays for the right to access the content.

The easiest way to explain how this works to to use myself as an example.
I'm a professional musician and about a year and a half a I put together a
package of instructional material for a high-school folk song club to help
the kids get started playing the banjo. I wasn't looking to publish a book.
I was just helping some kids out like folk musicians are supposed to do.
When word got out about the project I started getting requests from people
to buy a copy of the book. I printed a couple of hundred copies to see what
would happen and we sold those out in a mater of days.
We wound up starting a small publishing company and that book, and my second
book, are still selling like hotcakes.

In October I decided to put both books under a CC license.
I had two reasons for doing this. The first was simply that I write about
"folk" musical styles. I've put a horrible amount of work into learning the
banjo and the guitar, but none of the techniques I use or songs that I sing
are "mine". They are our shared cultural heritage. We're all free to use
these things as we see fit, but we don't own them. We just borrow them for a
while. In that sense CC looked like a way to release these ideas and songs
back into the wild.
The second reason isn't quite so romantic. A small press like ours is
fighting an uphill battle to get onto store shelves. Most of the big book
distributors and resellers are actively making it difficult for small press
books to reach customers. By uploading the complete contents of both books
online under CC I was able to put my stuff in front of a  freaking massive
audience. This is critical for any business because a niche market is only
going to support you for so long.

Since releasing to the books online sales are up. We're doing well enough on
Amazon for Barnes & Noble and other resellers to take us seriously (we're
taking over the local B&N store on December fourth to throw a jam session to
celebrate the release of my third book) Giving away the content actually
increased sales. You can use any reason you ant to for this. People like
paper, good karma or that people are basically decent and most folks will
want to buy something that helps them.  Take your pick because I don't know
why this worked. I just know that it did.

CC isn't a sales tool. It's not really a copyright either. It's more like an
ideal. "Here's my stuff. You can use it any way you want to within these
parameters." You can do that with a traditional copyright, but you won't
have the good mojo of the CC movement working in your favor.

-Patrick