awesome

[cofax7]

Steven K. Brust has released his Firefly novel under a Creative Commons License. Word and Adobe formats are up now; .txt and other versions coming later.

All hail the new millenium!

(Hat tip to sherrold for the link.)

ETA: How long until L** G***b**g's head explodes? End edit.

Comments

[batdina]

viz your edit: um, sooner is better?

[cofax7]

Heh.

Also, I suspect it's probably wise to grab it sooner rather than later; the more I think about it, the more I wonder how wise it was of him to put a license on it at all...

[batdina]

oh no worries on that account. I grabbed it as soon as sandy mentioned it. and you're correct. This will definitely bear watching carefully.

[kate_nepveu]

The first.

[cofax7]

He didn't write it under license: he couldn't get the approvals. I guess Fox (? right, it's Fox) didn't have any interest in authorized tie-in works. So he wrote it anyway.

I have questions about whether it's appropriate or legal under current copyright law for him to put a CC license on it, even a weak one, but IANAIPL.

[kate_nepveu]

I have questions about whether it's appropriate or legal under current copyright law for him to put a CC license on it

Do you mean, if it's infringing does he still hold copyright in it? The answer is yes. http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.html

[se_parsons]

L** G***b**g's head explodes?

I thought it had in the moment he discovered fanfic. The lack of brain in his discourse since then seems to bear it out.

[coffeeandink]

I'm kind of amused that his CC license excludes transformative works.

[kate_nepveu]

I wonder if that was intended? The introductory text doesn't include the no-derivative language.

*goes to leave comment*

[coffeeandink]

There *are* derivative-allowed licenses; Doctorow's released his own work under some of them.

[kate_nepveu]

Yes, I know. I wasn't clear. I mean that this text on the download page: "My Own Kind of Freedom has been released under a creative commons license. You are free to download it and share it with your friends as long as it is not used for commercial purposes."

doesn't include a no-derivative requirement, while the license does, so it may be that the license was picked in error. Or the text on the download page is sloppy. I've left a comment asking which.

[kestrelsan]

I'm kind of interested in the "donate" option--it was made clear in the comments that no money could be accepted for that specific work, but that one could follow a path to the donate page if one felt moved to do so. Is it the same as/different from fans asking for donations? Is it bordering on negating the non-commercial license? I'm ambivalent. But interested in how that plays out. And I think the novel itself is cool.

[serrana]

Non-commercial licenses (as I understand them, and IANAL) pertain to the consumer's use of the work, not the producer's.

For example: say I put up a photograph on my blog, which is CC-licensed (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0). You take that photo and make a t-shirt with the photo on it, putting a little note somewhere on the shirt with some sort of attribution on it (my name and URL, for instance). You wear the shirt. All cool. Now, let's say someone who's publishing a calendar approaches me and wants to use that same photo in the calendar. Since it's for resale (commercial use), she and I negotiate some sort of payment. This would not negate my CC license in any way.

Now, I have no idea how Brust's putting a CC license on fic is going to do, but I'll be fascinated to see what happens next....

[kestrelsan]

Thanks for the breakdown; that makes sense. I'm confusing the issues, too--I'm more interested in how money made off derivative work will affect one of the main defenses of fanfiction, that no money is being made. So in terms of how that impacts the CC license, if there's any connection...well, I'm most definitely not a lawyer *g*. It will be interesting to see.