Quote:
Originally Posted by FixB
Is it even legal to sell a book that is free under Creative Commons license ?
(just asking : I don't know, but I thought that with the CC licenses, you could only distribute it for free ???)
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Yes, it's legal for them to sell it. Your understanding of the Creative Commons license is wrong.
Here's the situation with Accelerando:
In the beginning, I wrote a book. And my literary agent sold the right to publish the book -- in dead tree
and electronic form, in North America, in English language, to Ace (a division of Berkley Publishing Group, aka a tentacle of Penguin Putnam). (Actually it happened the other way round -- Ace bought the book
before I bolted it together out of spare parts and applied the zappers to its torso -- but let's keep this simple.)
Around the same time, my agent sold the English language rights to Orbit, then a division of Time Warner, in the UK.
No, you didn't misread that: she sold the rights twice. There's a tradition in the publishing biz, going back to when the USA was basically piratesville (and refused to acknowledge anybody else's copyrights), of selling rights in North America separately from UK plus Rest Of World. So rights are sold on a territorial and linguistic basis.
As to the
how of publication ... sorry, but for some years the publishers have been demanding electronic rights. No electronic rights? No contract, no royalty cheques, and one hungry author. So yes, I sold them the electronic publication rights.
Then I went back to Ace and Orbit and explained in words of one syllable, with a business plan in hand, why doing a Creative Commons giveaway on the text -- under a restrictive, no derivative rights, no commercial reuse license -- would enhance sales of the dead tree edition, bring about world peace, etcetera. And, Cthulhu save me, both publishers agreed to sublicense to me a non-exclusive limited right to republish my own novel on a non-commercial basis for promotional purposes only.
(And boy did it take a lot of beating about the bush to get them to say "yes"!)
Anyway. The DRM'd commercial ebook edition of "Accelerando" is one of
two legal commercial ebook editions, put out by the legal rights holding publishers in their respective territories. And there's also the Creative Commons edition -- which hasn't been withdrawn because the cat's out of the bag, even though some of the more idiotic corporate types would blow a gasket if they
realized it had escaped -- which you are still free to download and pass around.
But if anything, it's the CC release that's tap-dancing on the questionable legal territory -- after all, it only exists by kind permission of Ace and Orbit.
Clear?