[cc-community] Exclusive commercial rights for a collaborative book

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 27 Jun 2016 23:29:16 +0300
Ahmet Emre Aladağ <aladagemre at gmail.com> wrote:

#include "I am not a lawyer.h"

> Hi,
> 
> I've started writing a book on Git/Gitbook. I want to licence it with
> Creative Commons Non-Commercial and offer it for free to the public.
> 
> I also want to make it collaborative so that anyone can contribute. But
> when they contribute, they have the copyright so they may not allow me to
> use it for commercial purposes.

Correct.

> What if I wanted to publish the book in printed format? That would require
> me to have commercial rights (so that I can make an agreement with
> publisher), which I don't have for the contributions from others.

That is unclear. One thing to realise is that CC-NC has a huge problem
and is a very bad licence in some respects. "Non commercial" means a
million things to a million people and in most legal jurisdictions is not
defined. So it may be important to be clear what you mean and will allow.

It's perfectly possible to print a CC-NC book, one usual way it happens
is that people wanting copies just go to the print on demand site you
uploaded it to and pay the printer for a copy. Likewise I know people
who've followed their interpretation of NC by printing a batch, selling
them and pricing so they don't make a profit. That is hard to do unless
you know the exact number of units in advance however.

> So, can I use a dual licensing so that

To a point. IUf you make it available CC-NC then a contributor can make
changes that are only CC-NC licensed, and some contributors may well wish
to do so. It's up to you to refuse to take changes back unless dual
licensed and original works from those contributors (because a CC-NC work
can have contributions made by a person which themselves contain CC-NC
compatible work by third parties which the contributor cannot choose to
dual licence).

Basically you need to both do your licence book keeping - and show you
have

> What's the best way to describe this dual licence?

As you have above, but make it clear what the rules for contributions
are. If you plan to do a commercial release then you probably also want
to track permission from your contributors, their identity and their
acknowledgement of your commercial use requirement.

One thing CC doesn't have a nice way to do that I know of is a CC-NC
where you permit accidental or necessary profit but require any so made
is contributed to a defined non profit cause.


Alan