Seth Godin's little mishap this week has been mentioned in The New York Times.
Long story short, his free ebook published under a creative commons license Everyone's an Expert (about something) (.pdf link) was printed by someone and sold on Amazon for 9.99 USD.
Just like said license allows.
Seth wrote in his blog "This is partially my fault because the creative commons license I chose for the copyright doesn't preclude something like this. However, trademark law is really clear and there's no doubt in my mind that selling this as a new book with my name on it is not kosher."
Partially his fault? I don't know much about trademark law, but did Seth Godin trademark his name? Seth Godin™? As for the CC license chosen, it is CC 2.5. If you want to publish work under a CC license which allows anyone to make use of a published work, as long as it is not for profit, try the non-commercial share-alike version.
Seth seems less peeved in his update, and he got a mention in the New York Times about his 2005 book, so that's good. Right? Plus, nobody broke any laws. Yeay.
I'm actually really surprised that there aren't publishers out there, who much like those adsense scraper blogs scrape the web for CC-licensed material and publish it to sell. At this point, there's enough stuff out there to fill an entire bookstore. Pick up some material and do print-on-demand and presto-profit! ;)
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I know. The "partially my fault" comment kills me. Anyone who's done a creative commons license knows there's a really simply interface (it's not like he missed a line in some long TOS agreement) and the first question asked is whether you want to allow commercial uses of your work. Seth could have precluded people from printing a paper version of his ebook and selling it by clicking "non-commerical use" at that point. Then someone still could of printed it and given it away. But I doubt Seth would have had a problem with that.
This wasn't a Creative Commons problem. It was user-error all the way.
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PermalinkExactly. I read a few of the trackbacked posts on Seths blog, and the majority of those who TB:d seem to be angry with the people who printed Seth's book, that is they also didn't understand that the CC license allowed exactly that. WTF people? Pay attention.
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