Open Access for Backlist Books, Part I: The Slush Pile

"Kale emerging from a slush pile"
(CC BY, Eric Hellman)

Book publishers hate their "slush pile": books submitted for publication unsolicited, rarely with literary merit and unlikely to make money for the publisher if accepted. In contrast, book publishers love their backlist; a strong backlist is what allows a book publisher to remain consistently profitable even when most of their newly published books fail to turn a profit. A publisher's backlist typically consists of a large number of "slushy" books that generate negligible income and a few steady "evergreen" earners. Publishers don't talk much about the backlist slush pile, maybe because it reminds them of their inability to predict a book's commercial success.

With the advent of digital books has come new possibilities for generating value from the backlist slush pile. Digital books can be kept "in print" at essentially no cost (printed books need warehouse space) which has allowed publishers to avoid rights reversion in many cases. Some types of books can be bundled in ebook aggregations that can be offered on a subscription basis. This is reminiscent of the way investment bankers created valuable securities by packaging junk bonds with opaque derivatives.

Open access is a more broadly beneficial way to generate value from the backlist slush pile. There is a reason that libraries keep large numbers of books on their shelves even when they don't circulate for years. The myriad ways that books can create value doesn't have to be tied to book sales, as I wrote in my previous post.

Those of us who want to promote Open Access for backlist ebooks have a number of strategies at our disposal. The most basic strategy is to promote the visibility of these books. Libraries can add listings for these ebooks in their catalogs. Aggregators can make these books easier to find.

Switching backlist books to Open Access licenses can be expensive and difficult. While the cost of digitization has dropped dramatically over the past decade, quality control is still a significant conversion expense. Licensing-related expenses are sometimes large. Unlike journals and journal articles, academic books are typically covered by publishing agreements that give authors royalties on sales and licensing, and give authors control over derivative works such as translations. No publisher would consent to OA relicensing without the consent and support of the author. For older books, a publisher may not even have electronic rights (in the US, the Tasini decision established that electronic rights are separate from print rights), or may need to have a lawyer interpret the language of the original publishing contract. 

While most scholarly publishers obtain worldwide rights to the books they publish, rights for trade books are very often divided among markets. Open-access licenses such as the Creative Commons licenses are not limited to markets, so a license conversion would require the participation of every rights holder worldwide. 

The CC BY license can be problematic for books containing illustrations or figures used by permission from third party rights holders. "All Rights Reserved" illustrations are often included in Open Access Books, but they are carved out of the license by separate rights statements, and to be safe, publishers use the CC BY-ND or CC BY-ND-NC license for the complete book, as the permissions do not cover derivative works. Since the CC BY license allows derivative works, it cannot be used in cases where translation rights have been sold (without also buying out the translation rights). A publisher cannot use a CC BY license for a translated work without also having rights to the original work.

The bottom line is that converting a backlist book to OA often requires economic motivations quite apart from any lost sales. Luckily, there's evidence that opening access can lead to increased sales. Nagaraj and Reimers found that digitization and exposure through Google Books increased sales of print editions by 35% for books in the Public Domain.  In addition, a publisher's commercial position and prestige can be enhanced by the attribution requirement in Creative Commons licenses.

Additional motivation for OA conversion of the backlist slush pile has been supplied by programs such as used by Knowledge Unlatched, where libraries contribute to to a fund used for "unlatching" backlist books. (Knowledge Unlatched has programs for front list books as well.) While such programs can in principle be applied for the "evergreen" backlist, the incentives currently in place result in the unlatching of books in the "slush pile" backlist. While value for society is being gained this way, the willingness of publishers to "unlatch" hundreds of these books poses the question of how much library funding for Open Access should be allocated to the discount bin, as opposed to the backlist books most used in libraries. That's the topic of my next post! 

Notes

This is the second in a series of posts about creating value of Open Access books. The others are:

• Creating Value with Open Access Books
• Open Access for Backlist Books, Part II: The All-Stars

Stop Making Web Surveillance Bugs by Mistake!

Since I've been writing about library websites that leak privacy, I figured it would be a good idea to do an audit of Unglue.it to make sure it wasn't leaking privacy in ways I wasn't aware of. I knew that some pages leak some privacy via referer headers to Google, to Twitter, and to Facebook, but we force HTTPS and make sure that user accounts can be pseudonyms. We try not to use any services that push ids for advertising networks. (Facebook "Like" button, I'm looking at you!)

I've worried about using static assets loaded from third party sites. For example, we load jQuery from https://ajax.googleapis.com (it's likely to be cached, and should load faster) and Font Awesome from https://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com (ditto). I've verified that these services don't set any cookies and allow caching, which makes it unlikely that they could be used for surveillance of unglue.it users.

It turned out that my worst privacy leakage was to Creative Commons! I'd been using the button images for the various licenses served from https://i.creativecommons.org/ I was surprised to see that id cookies were being sent in the request for these images.

In theory, the folks at Creative Commons could track the usage for any CC-licensed resource that loaded button images from Creative Commons! And it could have been worse. If I had used the HTTP version of the images, anyone in the network between me and Creative Commons would be able to track what I was reading!

Now, to be clear, Creative Commons is NOT tracking anyone. The reason my browser is sending id cookies along with button image requests is that the Creative Commons website uses Google Analytics, and Google Analytics sets a domain-wide id cookie. Google Analytics doesn't see any of this traffic- it doesn't have access to server logs. But without anyone intending it, the combination of Creative Commons, Google Analytics, and websites like mine that want to promote use of Creative Commons have conspired to build a network of web surveillance bugs BY MISTAKE.

When I inquired about this to Creative Commons, I found out they were way ahead of the issue. They've put in redirects to HTTPS version of their button images. This doesn't plug any privacy leakage, but it discourages people from using the privacy spewing HTTP versions. In addition, they'd already started to process of moving static assets like button images to a special-purpose domain. The use of this domain,  licensebuttons.net, will ensure that id cookies aren't sent and nobody could use them for surveillance.

If you care about user privacy and you have a website, here's what you should do:

1. Avoid loading images and other assets from 3rd party sites. consider self-hosting these.
2. When you use 3rd party hosted assets, use HTTPS references only!
3. Avoid loading static assets from domains that use Google Analytics and set id domain cookies.

For Creative Common license buttons, use the buttons from licensebuttons.net. If you use the Creative Commons license chooser, replace "i.creativecommons.org" in the code it makes for you with "licensebuttons.net". This will help the web respect user privacy. The buttons will also load faster, because the "i.creativecommons.org" requests will get redirected there anyway.

Attribution Meets Open Access

Credits Dancer (see on YouTube)

It drives my kids crazy, but I always stay for the credits after the movie. I'm writing this while on a plane over the Atlantic, and I just watched Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel. Among the usual credits for the actors, the producers, the directors, writers, editors, composers, designers, musicians, key grips, best boys, animators, model makers and the like, Michael Taylor is credited as the painter of "Johannes von Hoytl's Boy with Apple" along with his model, Ed Munro. "The House of Waris" is credited for "Brass Knuckle-dusters and Crossed Key Pins". There's a "Drapesmaster", a Millener and two "Key Costume Cutters". There are even "Photochrom images courtesy of The Library of Congress". To reward me for watching to the end there's a funny Russian dancer over the balalaika chorus.

It says a lot about the movie industry that so much work has gone into the credits. They are a fitting recognition of the miracle of a myriad of talents collaborating to result in a Hollywood movie. But the maturity of the film industry is also reflected in the standardization of the form of this attribution.

The importance of attribution is similarly reflected by its presence is each of the Creative Commons licenses. But many of the digital media that have adopted Creative Commons licensing have not reached the sort of attribution maturity seen in the film industry. The book publishing industry, for example, hides the valuable contributions of copy editors, jacket designers, research assistants and others. It's standard practice to attribute a work to the author alone. If someone spends time to make an ebook work well, that generally doesn't get a credit alongside the author.

The Creative Commons licenses require attribution, but don't specify much about how the attribution is to be done, and it's taken a while for media specific conventions to emerge. It seems to be accepted practice, for example, that CC licensed blog posts require a back-link to the original blog post. People who use CC licensed photos to illustrate a slide presentation typically have a credits page with links to the sources at the end.

Signs of maturation were omnipresent at the 6th Conference for Open Access Scholarly Publishing, which I'm just returning from. Prominent in the list of achievements was the announcement of a "Shared Statement and Community Principles on Expectations of Scholarly Standards on Attribution", a set of attribution principles for open access scholarly publications, signed by all the important open access scholarly publishers.

The four agreed-upon principles are as follows:

1. Researchers choosing Open Access and using liberal licenses do so because they wish to maximise access to and re-use of their work. We acknowledge the tradition of both freely giving knowledge to our communities and also the expectation that contributions will be respected and that full credit is given according to scholarly norms.
2. Authors choose Creative Commons licenses in part to ensure attribution and the assignment of credit. The community expects that where a work is reprinted, collected, aggregated or otherwise re-used substantially as a whole that the original source, location and free availability of the original version will be both made explicit and emphasised.
3. The community expects that where modifications have been made to an article that this will be made explicit and every practicable effort will be made to make the nature and scope of modifications explicit. Where a derivative is digital all practicable efforts should be made to make comparison with the original version as easy as possible for the user.
4. The community assumes, consistent with the terms of the Creative Commons licenses, that unless noted otherwise authors have not endorsed any republication or modification of their original work. Where authors have explicitly endorsed the republication or modified version this should be made explicit in a way which is separate to the attribution.

These principles, and the implementation guidelines that will result from further consultations, are particularly needed because many scholars, while supporting the reuse enabled by CC BY licenses, are concerned about possible misuse. The principles reinforce that when a work is modified, the substance of the modifications should be made clear to the end user, and that further, there must be no implication that republication carries any endorsement by the original authors.

One thing that is likely to emerge from this process is the use of CrossRef DOI's as attribution urls. DOIs can be resolved (via redirection) to an authoritative web and can be maintained by the publisher so that links needn't break when content moves.

As scholarly content gets remixed, revised and repurposed, there will increasingly be a need to track contributions every bit as elaborate as for Grand Budapest Hotel. Imagine a paper by Alice analyzing data from Bob on a sample by Carol, with later corrections by Eve. Luckily we live in the future and there's already a technology and user framework that shows how it can be done. That technology, the future of attribution (I hope), is Distributed Version Control. A subsequent post will discuss why every serious publisher needs to understand GitHub.

The emphasis on community in the the "Shared Statement" is vitally important. With consultation and shared values, we'll soon all be dancing at the end of the credits.

The Future of the Book is Unfinished: John Sundman's "Biodigital"

It used to be that a book was finished. Set the lead type and that was the book, for better or for worse. In some ways that's a virtue- the authors' pregnancy was finite; the labored give and take with publisher and editor would result in a pretty package of ink on bound paper. But at the same time it's a liability. Non-fiction books become obsolete as time leaves them behind. The artistic process isn't neat and clean. For great works of literature, generations of graduate students pore over notebooks, letters and ephemera to try to figure out what the great artist really meant, maybe it was just a big fish?

I find that the most interesting things going on in the ebook world now are being done by people who see books as continuing processes that need not be contained within EPUBs or frozen into PDFs. I notice that these creations fit poorly into today's book publishing machine. Formats go flat, conventional copyrights do copy wrongs; ISBNs go bonkers, bookstores start selling teddy bears and libraries look the other way.

Available at Unglue.it

Which brings me to John Sundman's Biodigital. Oh my god it was good.

As a reader, I found it profoundly disturbing. Disturbing the same way I felt the first time I experienced an earthquake. Having grown up on the east coast, earthquakes were abstractions to me. On moving to Palo Alto after college to take a job at Intel, earthquakes became something we joked about in the fab as we heated silicon wafers to 1200°C inside monstrous quartz tubes. I vaguely thought it would be fun to feel the earth shake. The next year I was a graduate student at Stanford and I felt my first real quake, the one centered in Coalinga. At first it was exciting, but then, as the ground started to roll, I began to worry if it was going to stop. When it was over, my cognitive relationship with the ground had changed. I had never doubted its solidity; suddenly I knew different.

Books aren't carved in stone any more. They are mutable. There, I've ruined them all for you. And there's a deadly earthquake in Biodigital. Whoops, I spoiled that one for you too.

Biodigital is a remix. About 60% of it came from Sundman's earlier novel, Acts of the Apostles, or so he tells us. 40% of Biodigital is new. I've not yet read that Acts, which makes me one of a very small number of people who have read Biodigital first. (I'll report back after reading Acts.) That subversive knowledge nagged at me through the whole book. "Was this chapter newly written, or was it 'original'?" Also, is the reader meant to know the book is remixed? What's supposed to be real in the book? There's a fictional corporate lab, Emverk, in Biodigital that's clearly supposed to be Xerox PARC, but does that make the fictional company real? Why do I care?

You may not share my paranoia of fictional reality if you read Biodigital. Because the reality is extremely vivid and fast-faced. At one point I had the notion that the book was written expressly for me, with inserted references to places I've been, things I've done, and people I've met. I've stood on a ridge on Skyline Drive, I've pored over chip schematics looking for the misplaced hunk of poly causing the glitch on the scope trace; and I've met that crazy guy at the bar in Antonio's Nut House. Somehow I missed that Sundman was there, taking notes. But by the end of the book, things become surreal, dead people start chasing you, and you don't know anymore whether the aromas you were smelling from Peking Garden existed at all.

Acts of the Apostles never really found its place in the publishing pantheon. It was Sundman's first novel. And since Sundman worked in technical documentation in the milieu of the pre-web internet, publishing it himself seemed natural. Soon after the licenses were introduced in 2003, Sundman's friend Cory Doctorow convinced him to adopt Creative Commons for his novels, so Acts was just the second Creative Commons novel ever. Slashdot reviewed it and it became a hackerish cult phenomenon,  even outselling Dan Clancy, Michael Crichton and Stephen King - for a few hours - on Amazon. Two sequels, Cheap Complex Devices, and The Pains followed Acts.

But Sundman still wanted a real publisher and the audience a real publisher can connect to. And after many rejections, he finally found a small publishing house that was doing some great things and he managed to get the publisher interested. As Sundman recounts, she

offered to hire an editor, at her expense, to read Acts, write an analysis, and make suggestions for improving it. So I said, “fine”, and she did so, and a few weeks later she sent me the result, and I had to agree that the outside editor had spotted the weak spots in the book and made reasonable suggestions for improving it. The suggestions were basically for fine-tuning the book that’s already written, not for a wholesale rewrite.

and so the rights to Acts were sold, and Sundman began working on the book that would become Biodigital. Remixing the raw material in Acts, if you will.

Long story short, the indy publisher was sold to another publisher, and the rights to Acts/Biodigital were reverted. So now what to do? How do you go about selling a book that's a remix of another book that's been free? From the buyer's point of view it's very confusing. Which book should be read first? Is Biodigital supposed to replace Acts as the first book in the series? If you've read Acts, do you really want to read Biodigital? From the bookseller's point of view, who's the audience- people who loved Acts?

Unglue.it's "Buy to Unglue" program was a good fit for the book. It uses a dated Creative Commons license on the books it sells. So on April 27, 2016 or sooner, depending on sales, Biodigital gets a CC BY-SA license. That means that Sundman isn't the only one who gets to remix the book. You can rewrite it to Pseudo-BioDigital if you want, and release it yourself under the same license, as long as you credit Sundman. It's a "Free Culture" license (albeit not yet) that allows the book to be never finished.

Biodigital is a novel of technopotheosis. Google that word, by the way. It's the process of humans merging with technology to become gods. But don't get the wrong impression. Biodigital isn't about technopotheosis.  It's about the reactions of people to the way technology changes us. One reaction is to decide it's fictional. Another is to be scared. And a third is to become a god. Really, we're all choosing, one way or another.

So we're merging real technology with real books to make them give them new life, giving them immortality. Bibliopotheosis?

Is the Kindle Direct Program MFN Legal?

If you sell an ebook through Amazon's Kindle Direct program, Amazon doesn't want you to offer it for less somewhere else. It's easy to understand why; if you're a consumer, you hate to pay $10 for an ebook on Amazon and then find that you can get it direct from the author for $5. But is it legal for Amazon to enjoin a publisher from offering better prices in other channels? In other words, is Amazon allowed to insist on a "Most Favored Nation" (MFN) provision?

Here's the provision in Amazon's Kindle Direct Program that constitutes an MFN:

4. Setting Your List Price
You must set your Digital Book's List Price (and change it from time-to-time if necessary) so that it is no higher than the list price in any sales channel for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book.
But if you choose the 70% Royalty Option, you must further set and adjust your List Price so that it is at least 20% below the list price in any sales channel for any physical edition of the Digital Book. 

I really don't know the answer, but I do know that Apple's MFN provision was a focus of the Department of Justice's successful prosecution of Apple and 5 colluding publishers for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. If Apple couldn't have a MFN, then how can Amazon insist on it, given their dominant market position in ebooks?

The Winston & Strawn law firm has a nice discussion of MFN clauses in the light of Judge Cote's decision in the US vs. Apple case. Here's the highlight:

Although the judge found that the MFN clause in this instance was critical to Apple’s ability to orchestrate the unlawful conspiracy, Judge Cote explicitly held that MFN clauses are not, in and of themselves, “inherently illegal.” Judge Cote explained that “entirely lawful contracts may contain an MFN …. The issue is not whether an entity … used an MFN, but whether it conspired to raise prices.” This determination, she stated, must be based on consideration of the “totality of the evidence,” rather than on the language of the agency agreement or MFN alone. Examining the facts in this particular case, Judge Cote found that Apple’s use of the MFN clause to facilitate the e-book conspiracy with the publishers constituted a “per se” violation of the antitrust laws.

Martin Coleman writes in mondaq:

depending on the economic and commercial circumstances, MFN clauses have on occasion caused concern to competition authorities. In particular:

• They can act as a disincentive to price cutting. If a supplier knows that, by offering a discount to any third-party customer, the supplier must also offer the customer benefiting from the MFN clause a discount to ensure that the latter enjoys the most favourable price, that is a "double cost" to price cutting, and therefore could have the effect of deterring price cuts and keeping prices higher than they might otherwise be.

In the European Union, Amazon has run into problems with a similar "Price Parity" provision for the Amazon Marketplace.  After inquiries by European Union regulatory agencies Amazon agreed NOT to enforce Price Parity, a policy that has been in effect since August 31, 2013. The Bookseller reported on the effect of this agreement in the (print) book market.

In the U.S., there's further confusion about distribution channel pricing because of the Robinson-Patman Act, which prevents them from pricing print books to favor one distributor over another. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, "The Act applies to commodities, but not to services, and to purchases, but not to leases." Since ebooks are licensed, not sold, it seems to this non-lawyer that Robinson-Patman shouldn't apply to ebooks.

The particular situation that has drawn my attention is the case of authors and publishers that make their ebooks available under Creative Commons licenses. Many of these authors also make their ebooks available via the Kindle Direct Publishing Program. There's nothing at all wrong with that - many readers prefer to get these ebooks onto their Kindles via Amazon, and are happy to know that some money ends up with the creators of the ebook. Amazon offers convenience, reliable customer service and wireless delivery.  

At Unglue.it, we're starting to offer Creative Commons creators the ability to ask people who download their ebooks for support (the program officially launches on April 30). The top concern these authors have expressed to us about this program is the "setting your list price" clause for their Kindle Direct channel. If they participate in our "Thanks for Ungluing" program they worry that Amazon will kick them out of the KDP program and the corresponding revenue stream.

We've done a few things to address this concern. Creators can set a "list price" in unglue.it- it's the suggested contribution for the pay-what-you-want download. And that's the price we report in our schema.org metadata.

But what if Amazon sees Unglue.it offering free downloads of books they're offering for $3.99 on the Kindle? Would they delist the book from the Kindle platform and kill that revenue stream? Or maybe delist the publisher entirely?

It seems to me that if Amazon did this, it could be running afoul of Judge Cote's guidelines for MFN provisions. Enforcing the MFN would amount to a retaliation against creators who offer lower prices (including zero) in other channels. Amazon doesn't even let you set your price to zero. 

What do you think?

Related articles

• Where do MFN clauses stand after Apple Price-Fixing Decision?
• The Procompetitive story that could undermine the DOJ's e-books antitrust case against Apple
• More Proof The Big Six Of Publishing Are Run By Morons
• Apple Inc. (AAPL) E-book Case Kills "Most-Favored Nation"

NYLSLR: The eBook Copyright Page is Broken

Somehow it slipped my mind that my article "The eBook Copyright Page is Broken" was published in the New York Law School Law Review in April. And I am still not a lawyer! Here's the meat of the article:

The traditional copyright statement is thoroughly and fundamentally broken. Consider the simplest possible case of a single copyright holder:

                         © Eric S. Hellman, 2013. All Rights Reserved. 

This is broken in the following ways:

1. Since there currently are not any copyright formalities, the copyright symbol means nothing. The work is subject to copyright with or without the copyright symbol.
2. The work may also not be subject to copyright, for example, if Eric S. Hellman is a government employee, a robot, or a non-creative compiler of factual information. In these cases there is no copyright even if there is a copyright symbol present. There is no legal duty for a publisher to put a copyright symbol only on a copyrightable work. How is the ebook user supposed to know the true copyright status of a digital work? 
3. “Eric S. Hellman” is an uncommon name. But suppose the author is named ”John Smith.” What use, then, is the copyright statement? It does not specify which Eric S. Hellman or which John Smith is the author.
4. The asserted name of the copyright holder can’t be relied on because text in a digital file can be altered without a trace. It’s simple to take a digital copy of Merchants of Culture and change its asserted copyright holder to “John Smith,” then redistribute it. This is a negligible problem in the print world.
5. The asserted date of publication may be unrelated to the date of the underlying copyright. For purposes of copyright (for example, when a work is produced as a work-for-hire), re-publication of a book does not change the copyright expiration date of the underlying text.
6. There is no specification of the work being copyrighted. In print there’s not much ambiguity, but digital books are composite objects (text and graphics are always separate entities in a digital book file) and are frequently distributed in pieces. Some ebooks even have front matter distributed as a pdf file completely separate from the chapters. In other cases, an ebook may be displayed on a website that has a separate set of copyright statements.
7. If the digital book is legally on your ebook reader, then, somehow, the rights holder has granted you some rights, perhaps under the terms of an explicit license or with the license implicit in its availability on a website. Either way, “all rights” have not been reserved. Licenses are not needed for printed books, but they may be needed for ebooks.

In February, I wrote about ebook front matter and back matter and there's more work to be done in this vein.

The last footnote deserves some glossing. In it, I assert that the ccREL submission for marking Creative Commons status of web pages is currently in conflict with the EPUB 3 standard for ebooks. While that's technically true, it's a bit misleading. A better way to say it is that developments in HTML5 and EPUB3 have made ccREL's approach archaic. The metadata machinery in EPUB3 and HTML5 is fully up to the task of expressing and applying Creative Commons licenses. What's lacking is consensus around which of the available mechanisms to use. Since the RDFa vs. Microdata in HTML5 controversy has not yet fully shaken out, you can't really follow ccREL as written, so we'll need to have some patience.

Proposal: The Dated Creative Commons License

Back on June 15, Peter Suber's book Open Access itself went open access, one year after its initial publication. You can get the ebook for free from MIT Press, but because of the Creative Commons license you can also get it from Internet Archive, and Unglue.it has a page to help you download it. It seems appropriate for this book to be its own publishing experiment, and from what I hear, the book has done well, in addition to doing good.

The "embargoed" or "delayed" model for open-access is tried and true in the scholarly journal business, and arguments about the appropriate length and propriety of embargoes are entrenched. In medical research, funding agencies such as NIH  demand embargoes of no longer than 12 months,  while humanities publishers argue that they need longer embargoes. Recently, the American Historical Association recommended that doctoral students be allowed to embargo their dissertations for up to six years. (Suber's book discusses delayed open access and embargoes in chapter 8, Casualties.)

Delayed open access for books, by contrast, is almost nonexistent. For ebooks, it would seem that an exclusive selling period followed by Creative Commons licensing could unlock a lot of value for society, and not just for scholarly works. Most books do most of their sales in the first year of publication and not much after that. The current duration of copyright, typically more than a hundred years, seems disproportionate in comparison. Used book stores capture some of the residual value of print books without profit to the rights holder, and libraries help to preserve another chunk of value. The lack of first-sale rights for ebooks leaves huge doubts about the viability of these channels for ebooks.

MIT Press accomplished the delayed open access with a promise on the copyright page of the ebook. Readers could rely on the integrity and prestige of MIT Press to make good on that promise. Wouldn't it be nice if doing something similar was easy to do for any sort of work, just like attaching a copyright date? Suppose I wanted exclusive rights to this blog post for five years, it would be nice if I could just write "(CC BY 2018)" with a url to provide the legal code.

I don't think I can really do that easily, today. Without some sort of license language, nothing would prevent me from changing my mind, so my prospective license offer would not be reliable. Today's Creative Commons licenses depend on conveyance of the license and assume immediate effect.  In the publishing world, companies go bankrupt or get acquired all the time. If Elsevier had acquired MIT Press in May, a purchaser of the book in April would have no assurance that the book would really go Open Access in June. This is not such an issue with journals because they're continuing publications.

Although I'm not a lawyer or anything, I've taken a first stab at language for applying a future date to a Creative Commons license. I've used Docracy to make the document public so that anyone can make modifications to improve it. (If you do a lot of contracts and you haven't seen Docracy, I suggest you go check it out!)  Or maybe other people have worked on this and can contribute some better language.

The beauty of Creative Commons is that it gives creators more options for distributing their works in partnership with users. A robust way of granting future CC licenses will allow more creators to vote with their works for mitigation of over-long terms-of-copyright.

Update: a quick comment from Timothy Vollmer points to a thread on [cc-licenses] that's very relevant, including some interesting discussion of the mysteriously named "Founder's License".

Update 2: James Grimmelmann, a real law professor, suggests via Twitter that "It is not out of the question that one could unilaterally enter into a binding future license at present." and points to the language he used on a 2005 Yale Law Journal Note:

Copyright © 2005 by The Yale Law Journal Company, Inc. For classroom use information, see http://www.yalelawjournal.org/about.asp. After June 1, 2006, this Note is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. Any use under this license must carry the notation “First published in The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, pp. 1719-58.”

This suggests that maybe I'm making things too complicated, which wouldn't be the first time. But I wish Creative Commons or someone would just tell us what to do!

Update August 9: I've written more about what we want to do with Dated CC at Unglue.it.

Does Asking for Money on Scribd Negate Creative Commons?

I think it does.

This is a quick post motivated by a balky comment system on Chronicle of Higher Education. There, Prof. Adeline Koh explores options available to scholars who want to make their dissertations publicly available. Koh chose Scribd to distribute her dissertation, Inventing Malayanness: Race, Education and Englishness in Colonial Malaya, and also chose to use the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND. So far, so good. Scribd is a perfectly good channel for distributing non-commercial content; CC BY-NC-ND is a perfectly honorable license for a dissertation. (Though I think CC BY-SA is much better in most use cases.)

But Koh used Scribd to set a download price of $2.99 on her dissertation. She has an absolute right to offer her work for sale under the license she chose. But there's a problem. Asking for money converts the Scribd offering to "Commercial Content", and thus invokes a bunch of provisions of the "Scribd Paid Access End User License Agreement", which users must agree to in order to purchase a download. This agreement states quite clearly

• You may not sell, distribute, or display any Scribd Commercial Content other than for personal use; 
• You may not share, lend, or rent copies of Scribd Commercial Content;
• You may not disable or circumvent DRM supplied with Scribd Commercial Content; 
• You may not make copies of all or any portion of any Scribd Commercial Content;

These conditions are in clear conflict with the specified Creative Commons License, and negate its intent. I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried to exercise my Creative Commons rights to a work I purchased from Scribd, Scribd could find a lawyer to sue me for doing so. 

All things considered, I think that use of Scribd in this circumstance is an attack on the integrity of the Creative Commons license. It does not reflect well on Prof. Koh, though she's clearly trying to do the right thing; more academics should be thinking about these issues. If she really wants to apply a Creative Commons license, she should be aware that anyone should be able to take their copy and make it available for download on a non-commercial site such as Internet Archive.

It's a shame that legal ambiguities and technicalities are preventing Creative Commons licenses from being as useful as they might be. Maybe we can get Scribd to clarify the EULA to accommodate situations like this.

Update August 2: Here's the response from Scribd.

Jason (Support Desk) Aug 02 09:30 am (PDT) Hi, The Scribd EULA declares "You may not share, lend, or rent copies of Scribd Commercial Content" under the assumption that most Commercial Content is posted with a standard copyright. Copyright licenses, including any Creative Commons add-ons, are set by the uploader. The uploader is the ultimate authority on a document's distribution license. Scribd takes no position on distribution license set by the uploader. If you have specific questions about copying or redistributing a particular document, please contact the uploader. I suggest leaving a note on the document page and the uploader will be notified. Best regards, Jason Bentley Scribd, Inc. So my answer to "is the CC license negated?" changes to "No, it's just muddied a bit".

Library Connections to Open Access eBooks

Power refugees at Montclair Public Library

Hurricane Sandy came through the other night and took away power for 90% of my New Jersey town. The one thing we miss, the one thing we ache for, is the connectedness we get from our devices. We're fine as long as we can keep our cell phones charged.

During my month-long tour telling people about Unglue.it, I've been challenging librarians to start thinking of themselves as connectors, not collectors. In an era of information abundance, library systems and processes that focus on managing an inventory of scarce resources are becoming less useful. The ability to connect a library user to the right information is becoming correspondingly more important.

Here's a crime scene we need to eradicate. A student comes into the library with a device, and asks for Moby Dick. It's been assigned reading, so all the print copies are checked out. Does the library have it as an ebook? Too often, there's no Moby Dick ebook listed in the library's catalog. The library depends on a commercial service to serve ebooks to its users, but the annotated ebook of Moby Dick that the library has licensed is checked-out. "Sorry, we don't have it" the student is told.

This should NEVER happen. Melville's Moby Dick: or The Whale belongs to all of us. Project Gutenberg has an excellent version, in formats that work on just about any device. But because it's free, no one has a monetary incentive to make that connection.

The barriers that libraries have put in place that prevent them from making use of open-access ebooks are mostly not intentional, but it will take some work to make them go away; it's something I've been working on since  the September release of the unglued edition of Oral Literature in Africa. I've been talking to the library automation and ebook platform vendors, who I know from my years in the library technology business. Without exception, the people I've talked to are enthusiastic about supporting unglued and other open-access ebooks, but there are lots of barriers. Their systems have been hard-wired to assume that library ebooks will always have digital rights management, or can only be used one user at a time. These restrictions are incompatible with the Creative Commons license we're using for unglued ebooks.

There's not much awareness of the no-DRM provisions of Creative Commons licenses, but it's there, in section 4(a):

When You Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work, You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License. 

This clause also serves as a barrier to commercial use by people other than the rights holder, even for the licenses that allow commercial use. For example, the Kindle store automatically applies DRM, so unless you have permission from the rights holder, you can't sell someone else's Creative Commons licensed ebook in the Kindle store.

It will take some time and a lot of work, but eventually the library barriers to Open Access ebooks will fall. But until then libraries need to ask their vendors to give these changes a high priority. Libraries that are investigating new systems for ebook distribution need to add requirements in their RFPs for serving open access ebooks along side print and pretend-its-print books.

Hurricane Roll - by Tony

There are also barriers barriers preventing libraries from using these resources that are created by libraries themselves. Libraries have many processes and workflows surrounding resource acquisition, circulation, and evaluation that overlook the opportunity to serve users with free resources. While academic libraries have been thinking about ways to support open-access academic journals for years now, books are different. Book acquisition is often funded through approval plans and selection committees that don't consider the availability of free resources, no matter their quality. And if a library measures its performance using circulation numbers which don't include connections to free resources, then how often will then resources be supported?

Connections can occur in many ways. Today, I'm connected my laptop power at the library along with more than 254 other refugees deprived of power and internet by Sandy. I know it's more than 254 because my laptop couldn't get an IP address on the WiFi. So I went to the sushi bar/cafe down the street, connected to the wifi, and ordered a "Hurricane Roll". And clicked "publish".

OA CC-BY MIT WTF?

Update:
MIT Press revised the Copyright page for the ebook version. I've scraped it for you:

© 2012 The MIT Press. All rights reserved. Subject to the Creative Commons licenses noted below, no part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or displayed by any electronic or mechanical means without permission from The MIT Press or as permitted by law.



This book incorporates certain materials previously published under a CC-BY license and copyright in those underlying materials is owned by SPARC.



Effective June 15, 2013, this book will itself be subject to a CC-BY-NC license.

For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Suber, Peter.
Open access / Peter Suber.
   p. cm. — (MIT Press essential knowledge)
 
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-51763-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-262-30098-8 (retail e-book)
1. Open access publishing. I. Title.
Z286.O63S83 2012
070.5'7973—dc23
2011038297

CC BY and the Truth-Printing Business

Why are dollars worth anything? Why are digits on a bank statement worth anything? When my server tells our payments provider to move bits from your credit card, why does it matter to you?

In practical terms, dollars are valuable because other people will give you stuff or do things for you in exchange. Or at least they will if you can convince their bank to change the digits in their bank account. Their bank has to trust your bank which has to trust you. It all works because we all trust it will work. And why do we trust that it will work?

There are governments and laws to back them up. Why do we trust the government and laws? In practical terms we trust the government and laws because... well... they have ballot boxes. And judges and police forces. But mostly we trust the government and legal system because it sort of works and is often not abusive. At the bottom, it's because there's this web of trust which collectively holds everything together. Until of course, it doesn't. Because there isn't a bottom, it's turtles all the way down.

If you haven't heard of Bitcoin, let me give you this non-technical summary. Bitcoin is a recent implementation of the idea that money based on a web of cryptographically secured assertions is sounder than money based on a web of governmentally secured assertions. If as many people believed in cryptography as believe in astrology, we'd be using Bitcoin today.

The magic result is that an entity that gets society to trust its currency can then print money.

When the currency is truth rather than coin, judges and guns don't work so well. Traditional hierarchical authority systems are breaking down. What's replacing them is open authority systems. Systems such as wikipedia which allow everyone to participate in the construction of truth, not by being correct, but by being fixable. And to the frustration of many, Wikipedia delegates all its authority to things that are "citeable".

So how do you get to be an authority that Wikipedia believes? The two criteria that seem to matter most are

1. Openness. If wikipedians can't read you, you don't exist. 
2. Authority. People need to believe you. 

If you notice the circularity here, you'll see that printing truth and printing money are not so different.

As usual, I take a long time getting around to my point. Which is this: If you want to be in the business of printing truth, the best license to choose for your business is the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). For now. And if you're printing science, medicine, technology or even philosophy, I really hope you want to print truth.

The Creative Commons part speaks to the need to be open. In the age of the internet, you can't print truth and keep it secret. No one will believe you.

The Attribution part builds your most valuable asset, your reputation. No one believes anonymous assertions.

You might ask about other options, for example, Non-Commercial (NC), No Derivatives(ND), Share-Alike (SA).

I've written about reasons to use NC and ND. Those reasons don't apply to the truth-printing business.

Can you imagine if your dollar bill said "This note is legal tender for all non-commercial debts public or private". That would be silly. The whole point of money is that it doesn't change depending on its use. And its the same with truth. There ain't no such thing as non-commercial truth. You can't control the uses of the truth you print. You can't even demand that people who consume your truth share that truth the same as you do..

A lot of people get confused about using no-derivative licenses. They think that if you print that the sky is blue, your credibility will be hurt if someone reprints a derivative of your truth and says the sky is black. But that's exactly what the attribution requirements prevent. But more than that, if you print your truth as chiseled in stone, then no one will believe it in a few years or so, because we all know that the truth hasn't been chiseled in stone for at least two thousand years. Nowadays we can make cryptographically strong proofs that assertions aren't being fiddled with and were made by the entities they're attributed. We can track the trail of assertions through history. And the provider of that chain of provenance is you, the truth printing proprietor. The longer the trail of conflicting assertions, the more crucial your authority as a truth printer becomes.

The problem of turning the currency of truth into harder currency is left as an exercise for the reader.

The "I Used This" Button

I frequent-flyered off to San Francisco this weekend to surprise my Ph. D. Advisor, Jim Harris, for his 70th Birthday. I was the first of his students to graduate, and he's up to 105. On thing I learned helping to start his group was the immense value of being thrown together with a group of smart people with a variety of experience. I met members of Jim's current group, which includes a student from Gunn High School, visiting scholars from around the world, and Ph. D. students bursting with ideas.

I manufactured some business-related meetings for the trip, some of which I'll relate in a to-be-written post, but I also lucked into a hackathon for Open-Access hosted by PLoS. I spent the day with a group of smart people with a wide range of experience, including software developers, product managers, film-makers and a librarian or three.

The group I ended up working with included Greg Grossmeier from Creative Commons, Cameron Neylon from PLoS, and Ana Nelson, the developer-entrepreneur behind dexy. We were interested in counting open-access things. Counting things can be harder than you think, because you have to define the things and identify them; you need to be able to tell whether a thing is the same thing as another thing, or perhaps it's three things. Counting bananas is one thing, but have you ever tried counting ideas?

Creative Commons (CC) is interested in knowing how much its licenses are used. When an Unglue.it ebook edition is released (of course under Creative Commons!), how often is it used? Does a single license apply to the entire book, or can we apply different licenses to the different resources inside the book? For example, an author may want to use a CC-BY license for the text of a book, which might contain figures that are used under CC BY-ND. And the metadata should be CC0. How should these licenses be expressed?

After some discussion, we settled down to work on some specific projects. My project turned out not to be code at all, but rather a description of a scheme for measuring Creative Commons usage, i.e. the rest of this blog post.

Creative Commons has thought about ways to measure the usage of its licenses. For example, it can track the display of its license "badges", such as the one right here. Web browsers will send a referrer header that tells the image server the web page and user IP address. But there are problems. Many web sites use their own copy of the badge. In an ebook, the badge would be embedded in the ebook file. If the page is served over a secure socket, the referrer won't be set. And do you really want to tell Creative Commons about everything you're reading?

Speaking of which, have you clicked on a Facebook "Like" button this week? Was it good for you too?

Suppose there was a button on Creative Commons licensed documents that allowed the user to express their delight at the creator's enlightened choice of license. Would you click it? I call it the "I Used This" (IUT) button, but maybe you can think of a better name.

• The IUT button would send a signal to a Creative Commons server about usage of the resource. These signals would be compiled and reported.
• IUT button would also send attribution url.
• Pressing the button would display an amusing animation to the user. Perhaps every button would have a different animation to avoid button fatigue.
• The button would be at the center of an advocacy campaign for open licenses.
• Unlike the Facebook Like button, the IUT button would respect a user's privacy. A signal would be sent only when initiated by the user, and would be optional.
• An IUT button packaged as a javascript would work in epub, html, etc.
• IUT signals would be evidence of the resource's status as a CC licensed work. A licensor attempting to revoke a CC license (you can't do that!) would have to overcome a verifiable usage trail.
• Users could create accounts at CC to provide a retrospective record of the user's Use.
• Clicking the IUT Button would put the attribution url on clipboard to ease correct citations.
• Usage information for each resource would be public- creators could easily track the usage signals for their works.
• We might need anti-ballot-stuffing measures if CC usage rankings become commercially important.

If efforts like Unglue.it are to succeed, people who appreciate the benefits of Creative Commons licensing need to stand up and be counted. We need to make it a mass movement in the minds of every lover of books, everywhere.

Sometimes you need to do more than just consume. Sometimes you need to do some SHOUTING.

Creative Commons Media Neutrality and eBook Rights after Rosetta v. Random

Here's where it gets complicated.

Not so long ago, book publishers had no idea that there would be such things as digital books. Publishing contracts mentioned nothing about ebooks. Literary agents made sure to keep derivative rights separate, so that translation rights, film rights, stage adaptation rights, etc. for a successful book could be separately monetized.

When ebooks started to become important, the digital publisher Rosetta Books took advantage of the situation, and started acquiring ebook rights to well-known books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This did not please the print publishers at all. Random House, one of the "Big Six" US publishers, took Rosetta to court, saying that their publishing contracts gave them exclusive rights to distribute books, and ebooks were books.

And here’s where it gets REALLY complicated. The District Court ruled against Random House, but narrowly, and the Appeals Court upheld. It wasn't that the ebook's bookness was obvious one way or another.  The courts only refused Random House’s request for an injunction.  Random House had asked the court to order Rosetta Books to immediately “cease and desist” selling ebook editions of Random House books.  Without an injunction, Random House would have had to continue with a lengthy legal preceding to assert its publication rights.

Instead, Random House negotiated a settlement with Rosetta Books, one which allowed some older books to be issued in ebook format by Rosetta. Rosetta got their ebook rights and Random got an undisclosed revenue share, according to Publisher’s Weekly. The details are not public, but the practical result seems to be that if Random House does not want to reissue an ebook of a book based on an older contract, they will allow the author to contract separately with a third party, such as Rosetta.   Open Road Media is a more recent, and more aggressive, ebook "reprinter," and they have also contracted separately with authors and estates for ebook editions, such as the "enhanced" From Here to Eternity; Random House retains print rights only.

Despite this uncertainty, the book publishing industry has managed, for the most part, to avoid destructive legal battles. It seems to be understood by literary agents that ebook rights for works under pre-Rosetta print contracts are to be offered first to the publisher with print rights. While Random House will often waive ebook rights, Harper, S&S, Penguin, Macmillan, Hachette seem to block 3rd party licenses, slowly adding the backlist ebooks to their ebook catalogs, and only if they can get authors to accept the current standard ebook royalties, 25% of net.  If no agreement can be reached on royalties no ebook is published.

For other publishers, the situation is confusing. According to Rosetta, "in England, the agent and author community has been clear for ten years that these backlist electronic rights are owned and controlled by the authors". Smaller publishers will often revert ebook rights because conversion and distribution costs for backlist books make it too expensive to create an ebook only to keep ebook rights.

The effect of the Rosetta v Random non-decision has been that a large number of works whose print rights remain with a publisher have ebook rights which  may be subject to dispute.  Often these books are scholarly works or trade books with little commercial value.

Our goal in building Unglue.it is to work with rights holders to re-license books such as these with the financial backing of book lovers everywhere. These "unglued ebooks" would be "given to the world" under something like a Creative Commons (CC) license. But how can such a license be applied when there is  such uncertainty around ebook rights?

One problem is that the Creative Commons licenses are media neutral. If I release a print book under a CC license, there's nothing in the license to stop anyone from scanning it, turning it into an ebook, and distributing it on their website. Similarly, a CC ebook can be printed and bound, and redistributed with the same license, so long as the other license terms are obeyed.

It's not enough to have ebook rights to release a Creative Commons ebook, you need to have print rights cleared as well! ¹ (If you thought this article had reached the zenith of complicationness, you thought wrong.)

If what you're really interested in is ebook rights, then why use a Creative Commons license? With a CC BY-NC-ND license, the allowed noncommercial print uses are probably not very valuable.

Looking at this issue with our legal counsel, we considered the option of creating our own "Unglue.it eBook License" which would be similar to Creative Commons but which would prohibit even non-commercial printing. Unfortunately, this option would:

1. require us to establish an entirely new publishing "standard" license;
2. add legalese and restrictions that supporters and rights holders alike would find unfamiliar and undesirable;
3. lose the benefit of the universal and clear standards of the Creative Common licenses.  CC licenses, for example, can be recognized and acted on by automated search engines.  Precedents exist for what is allowed. For almost a decade, CC licenses have allowed authors such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow to publish successful commercial print and ebook editions alongside open access, CC-licensed ebook editions.

A different strategy would be to use a standard CC ND license, but to add a technical obstacle to printing which does not conflict with open access for the digital version.  If we created something inherently digital (e.g. with revisions that include animations throughout that can’t be printed), then printing a version without animation would violate the non-derivative aspect of the license.

We're not enthusiastic about this option either.  Just as legalese confuses normal people, the subtleties of media technology are likely to confuse lawyers and Judges. If someone wants to object to our interpretation of a “derivative use,” there's no technology that can keep them from suing.

A third option is by far our top choice, and is the one we will pursue. Get the various rights holders to agree among themselves!  Since the CC BY-NC-ND license only allows incidental and not-for- profit printing of ebooks, print publishers willing to let an author unglue an eBook using this license should also be willing to waive any conflict with their “exclusive” print rights.

Authors and publishers have mostly managed to get on with business without a clear legal decision on whether an ebook is a book. The possibility of a crowd-funded payoff shared by print and digital rights holders should create a strong incentive for them to work together to unglue the ebook.

How hard could it be?

Notes:

1.  Or at least, you need to have any publisher with “exclusive” print rights waive those rights with respect to any “non-commercial” printing of a CC ebook for personal use.
2. My colleague Amanda Mecke contributed to this article.
3. Yes, that's the new logo for the Unglue.it service, coming soon!
4. Standard IANAL disclaimer.

Creative Commons - ND (No Derivatives)

When I was a sophomore in high school, I read Catcher in the Rye. To me, the amazing thing about this book was the language. It seemed like every other word was "bastard", "goddam" or "sonofabitch". What were my teachers thinking?

Imagine if the Salinger estate decided to release a Catcher in the Rye ebook with a Creative Commons License so that 10th graders around the world could read it for free. What sort of license would they choose? In particular, would they choose a "No Derivatives" license?

Here's the "legal code" of the No Derivatives (ND) restriction in the CC BY-NC-ND license:

The [granted] rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Adaptations.

"Adaptation" means a work based upon the Work, or upon the Work and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, adaptation, derivative work, arrangement of music or other alterations of a literary or artistic work, or phonogram or performance and includes cinematographic adaptations or any other form in which the Work may be recast, transformed, or adapted including in any form recognizably derived from the original, except that a work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License. For the avoidance of doubt, where the Work is a musical work, performance or phonogram, the synchronization of the Work in timed-relation with a moving image ("synching") will be considered an Adaptation for the purpose of this License.

The advantage of allowing derivative works (Adapations) is that people would be free to use Catcher in the Rye for all sorts of amazing things. There would be a thousand YouTube dramatizations of Catcher in the Rye, free to all. There would be fan fiction. There would be novels about Holden as a homeless person, Holden as a Wall Street tycoon, or as President Caulfield. There would be translations, graphic novels and operettas. Best of all there would be versions of Catcher that would have all the goddams replaced by gosh darns and bitches replaces by guns, and that's what 10th graders would read in Texas. Imagine what they'd read in North Korea: Brother Ho Gathers Rice.

J. D. Salinger is rolling over in his grave even as we ponder the scenario. I think it's safe to say that Catcher in the Rye will not see a license allowing derivatives in my lifetime or in yours. It's not about generosity at all, it's about the artistic vision of the author. And J. D Salinger is not alone in wanting to ensure the integrity of his works. That why Creative Commons offers the "No Derivatives" option for its licenses in the first place.

There are lots of cases in which it's valuable to be able to change a work. As much as it hurts when your edit is reverted, the most amazing feature of Wikipedia is that anybody can change it. For a jazz singer, a song that you can't riff on is not jazz at all. For a teacher, a textbook that you can't adapt to your curriculum is just wrong. In these and many other applications, an ND license seriously reduces the value of a work.

But to date, most books have been written with the expectation that the the version that goes out to the printers is more or less the version that will be read. Authors have not incorporated the possibility of remixing and read-write literature into their creative visions. Certainly this will change as new forms and conventions emerge. But for now, most authors want to control the expression of their creations, even if they're willing to set them free. For the purposes of Unglue.it, we have to respect these wishes if we are to convince authors to release their works into the public commons. Money is not the issue.

As Mike Taylor, a long time friend of this blog, commented on a previous post, the ND aspect of our "standard" license clashes somewhat with the second two bullet points of Creative Commons'  "Share, Remix, Reuse" slogan.  It's important to recognize that even the CC BY-NC-ND license that Unglue.it will use by default unlocks "Remix" and "Reuse" activity that falls under "Fair Use".  The Creative Commons licenses leave untouched the fair use rights of users, and are hostile to Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that in practice impedes these rights. DRM typically blocks many types of fair use, and in the US, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalizes the circumvention of this DRM.

Many of the derivative works that have Salinger spinning are allowed under fair use no matter what the license. But an ND license lets an author keep potentially valuable movie rights and translation rights. The value of these would be enhanced by letting everyone in the world read the book for free through ungluing, and this incentive will benefit the public by reducing the authors' ungluing price.

It's hard to know what sorts of "adaptations" of a work will be possible in the future. However, the Creative Commons licenses, including the ND licenses, make it clear that users have the right to migrate the work to new formats for the purposes of accessibility and compatibility with new media and technology. This is important to all of us, because without this right, it's quite possible that many of the ebooks we use today will be unreadable 50 or a hundred years from now.

Notes:

1. As always, don't confuse this blog with legal advice.
2. According to Wikipedia, Catcher in the Rye continues to sell 250,000 copies a year. 
3. The Catcher in the Rye is #410 on Amazon's best-seller list. 
4. A fair "ungluing price" for Catcher in the Rye would be at least $4,000,000.
5. I've previously posted about the Attribution and Non Commercial attributes of Creative Commons Licenses
6. It's funny. Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.