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

[Ahmet Emre Aladağ]

Thank you Romaine Wiki and Alan Cox, your answers gave me deep insights.

I decided to use CC BY-SA 4.0 license for my book. It will be much easier.


On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 4:03 PM, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
Ahmet Emre Aladağ