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For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downlo
by abdullahkhalids 4y ago
For what it is worth, Cory Doctorow used to license his books with Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs. You can even find direct and free downloads to his books on his website [1]. At the same time, his publishers were selling hardcopies.
Unfortunately, at some point he stopped doing it. He explains
> There is also the fact that, in the time since Creative Commons licenses were negotiated, publishers have entered into agreements with the large ebook retailers that allow for price matching. This is in part an artifact of anti-trust litigation, but it means that if someone somewhere offers the book at $0, it technically allows all of the other ebook stores to offer the book at $0 as well.
> Thus far my publishers have been good about grandfathering in the CC-licensed books that I already had, but for the last couple of books I haven’t done CC licensing, in part because of the real fear that Amazon could set the price at $0 and there would be no recourse for my publishers—not even the recourse of not letting Amazon sell the book, because of deals ensuring that if Amazon sells one book of a publisher’s, they have to sell the whole catalog.
[1] https://craphound.com/pc/download/ https://craphound.com/pc/download/
[2] https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offering-a-good-product-at-a-fair-price-cory-doctorow-on-fair-trade-e-books-publishing-copyright-and-the-optimism-of-disaster/ https://www.authorsalliance.org/2017/05/09/a-good-guy-offeri...
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoCory Doctorow's license on his books is explicitly Noncommercial, No derivative. The person I was disagreeing with would disagree even with that permissive license! And it would also go along with my argument, that Cory Doctorow is still retaining rights to demand payment if people make a killing selling his work in other markets or adapting his work. I have no issues with creatives willingly picking which rights they choose and which rights they keep. But you can see even with more permissive licensing, Cory Doctorow is still retaining the most salient and potentially profitable ones for himself.
- abdullahkhalids 4y agoThat is exactly the point. Copyright is not a single right. We need to expand the discussion to talk about the validity and duration of each of those rights.
- PuppyTailWags 4y agoI'm completely comfortable talking about those things! :) I just disagree with the notion that copyright should just magically go away without any serious consideration of its consequences to creatives. I'm more than happy with some hypothetical solution that both prevents inaccessibility to creative works and also enforces that creatives should be compensated for their labor.