Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Negotiating a CC license

Michael Mandiberg, Howto Negotiate a Creative Commons License: Ten Steps, Michael Mandiberg, January 12, 2009. (Thanks to Creative Commons.)

... [T]he focus of this post is on how we were able to negotiate the Creative Commons license [for our book] from [publisher] New Riders, which is owned by Peachpit, which is owned by Pearson (a big big corporate big thing.) ...

Publishers know things are going to change, but they don’t know what that change is going to be. Know that your publisher is willing to experiment. ...

Use case studies to argue with facts. It also helps for them to see that other reputable publishers have licensed books Creative Commons. ...

Gavin Baker, How to negotiate a Creative Commons license in a work contract, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, January 14, 2009.

... Even friendly organizations tend to use legal boilerplate in their contracts — which typically treats your intellectual production as a work for hire, assigning exclusive copyright to your client or employer. This should be problematic for anyone: not only do you lose the right to apply a CC license to your work, you lose the right to use your work for any purpose without getting your (former) employer’s permission.

Without getting into a discussion about the work-for-hire doctrine, there’s an easy way around this. You can assign copyright to your employer, but you get a non-exclusive license, too. This is similar to the logic of the author addenda of the scholarly publishing world. They can do anything they want with the content you produced — but you can, too. ...