1: Jammie Thomas will appeal, lawyer says

First off today, Jammie Thomas plans on appealing her case, focusing on the constitutionality of the damages levied against her. She has said that she is not interested in any settlement that involves her admitting guilt or paying money and has decided, despite the $1.9 million judgment against her, to appeal the case in hopes of either getting the verdict tossed or the damage reduced.

However, as Ben Sheffner points out in a quote, Thomas has an uphill battle on this front as no Federal court has done what she and her attorneys are asking it to do.

After the first trial, there are reports she received an offer to settle the case for about $25,000, an offer that was passed up in favor of a retrial, where the current $1.9 million verdict was handed down.

2: Ruling for Salinger, Judge Bans ‘Rye’ Sequel

Next up, Judge Deborah A. Batts has issued a preliminary injunction, barring the sale of “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye” in the U.S. saying that it is an unauthorized sequel of the book “Catcher in the Rye”, written by J.D. Salinger, and is thus a likely violation of Salinger’s copyright. This comes after the judge issued a temporary 10-day order late last month.

Fredrik Colting, the Swedish author of the new book, said his work was intended to be a parody and expressed disbelief at the “banning” of his book. He could still take this matter to trial but the book can not be published in the U.S. until the litigation is resolved.

However, the book is currently published in the UK.

3: The Copyright Catch 22

Finally today, attorney Ronald S. Rosen, who successfully defended John Williams against claims he lifted musical elements when writing the score for E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, explained why he has not released video or podcast versions of his book to help laypeople understand the intricacies of music. Namely that he would need to obtain licenses to use the music, even short passages, in any talk, video or audio presentation he gave.

This highlights the issue with teaching music copyright to up and coming attorneys outside of the courtroom and classroom. It raises a slew of questions about how to educate attorneys and laypeople about these issues moving forward.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

In May I covered C-Registry, an orphan works prevention service that is working to create a registry of images and other visual content on the Web as well as give visual artists a means to both locate their work on the Web and ensure that anyone who finds it will know who they are and how to correctly license it.

Though my review was overall very positive, I noted that the site had several potentially serious limitations, most notably that the service could only match exact images, meaning that any modification (cropping, recoloring, etc.) would prevent an image from being correctly identified and likely make it an orphan again.

Well, last week C-Registry announced a series of upgrades to its service, including aforementioned exact matching problem. Here’s a quick rundown of the biggest enhancements.

Image (Pattern) Recognition

Where previously C-Registry needed an exact match of an image to find the original, it now also provides a collection of similar images for the user to search through . These similar images are displayed in a system somewhat similar to Mac’s Coverflow feature (see example right) and the user just clicks the displayed image to see the ones behind.

Though this system confused me at first, I’m more used to a mouse click opening up the image than moving to the next one, it works relatively well and the matching, from the limited samples I was able to see, seemed to do a decent job, catching a variety of changes to the image including sizing, color and more. As you can see in the example, it detected a different version of the scale image, one where the bowl is filled with ice instead of the brown sugar.

What is interesting about this system is that, according to their press release, the technology can also work on video and audio as well as it is truly pattern matching, not image matching. This could make it very useful to a broader audience as the service expands.

In its current form though, this system seems to be very effective and it addresses one of the major holes with the service.

Bulk Uploading

Previously, images could only be uploaded one at a time. C-Registry has fixed this problem by adding a pair of bulk upload options, one using a desktop application and the other through a bulk upload process where the rightsholder uses a CSV file with the information about each image the URL of the file and the system takes care of the rest.

Though this is something of a catch up feature, most registries offer some form of bulk upload, at least behind the scenes and is not likely to be useful for most smaller rights holders, larger ones, such as newspapers, stock photo agencies, etc. will greatly appreciate this feature since the information is, most likely, already in some form of database and can be easily exported.

At this time, bulk uploading is limited only to authenticated accounts, which costs $25 per year.

Video User Support

The C-Registry has also opened up a YouTube account where they provide some basic instructions on how to use the service, including the video about their bulk upload feature embedded below, and hopes to expand its video library with a series of tutorials and guides on how to use the service for various functions.

Though this is certainly a minor upgrade to the service it is very helpful when trying to use the site and gives a glimpse at features only available to paid users without requiring a user to put up any money.

Bottom Line

In the end, this is just one of the obstacles the site has to overcome to become a major image search database to locate and identify orphan works. It still has to solve the “chicken and egg” problem of getting enough images to warrant searching through (something it hopes to handle through partnerships with stock photo agencies) and the site itself could certainly use a visual and technical refresh (I could not stay logged in during my testing).

However, it is clear that the site is gaining some traction and that the backend technology is starting to come together. Their system of fingerprinting, not storing, files has made it possible for them to build a very large database with a relatively small infrastructure and the technology seems to be working very well. Hopefully they can continue to build upon this and grow their service.

In short, there is a ton of potential here, even more so now, but there is still a lot of work to be done, something I think the admins know very well.

Scale Photos from: Pictures Color Library UK

Video

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1: RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case

First off today, the RIAA scored a big win over Usenet.com. Usenet is an online network that is over two decades old and predates the Web. It was, and still remains, one of the most popular ways to share files and content online and Usenet.com is a service that charges a monthly fee for easy access to that network, including the files.

The fact Usenet.com lost may not be as important as why it lost. The company was accused of massive amounts of misconduct during the discovery process including, allegedly, destroying seven hard drives, sending witnesses to Europe so they can’t be deposed and otherwise obstructing the RIAA from gathering information.

In the end, the judge ruled that Usenet.com can not use the Betamax ruling in its defense, which said that the creator of a product can not be held liable if it has significant non-infringing use, due to the fact that Usenet.com’s relationship with the customer continued after the sale. Also, due to the misconduct, the judge barred the company from raising a defense under the DMCA, which protects Web hosts from liability if they expeditiously remove infringing material following notification.

In the end, it seems as if Usenet.com had a better chance at success before the alleged misconduct and only narrowly escaped a judgment against them on those grounds alone.

2: The Pirate Bay’s Revolt

Next up today, The Pirate Bay users, in a move that was pretty predictable, have revolted in a significant way against their former favorite Bittorrent tracker following its recent sale to a Swedish software company.

Though no one is really sure what will happen to the site, users have been asking for the ability to delete their account, while others have been calling for attacks against the site to bring it down.

However, even if The Pirate Bay is able to complete itself and survive this revolt, its odds of becoming a successful, legitimate business (if that is indeed the plan) are slim. Grokster, Napster and other services have shown have difficult it is to “go legit”.

3: Music copyright lawsuit targets Microsoft, Yahoo, Real

Finally today, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Real (though not Apple) are all being sued by Music Copyright Solutions (MCS) for allegedly not obtaining all of the correct rights to some of the songs in their catalogs. At odds specifically are the rights to some 200 compositions that MSC claims the companies correctly licensed the performance rights to, but not the composition ones. It is the composers that they are representing.

The case would be fairly dull but MCS is suing for each copy of every recording. So if a song is on four different albums, it is listed four times and MCS is seeking the maximum damages possible, $150,000 per infringement, putting the potential liability into the billions.

Now the odds of the judgment/settlement reaching anywhere near that is slim to none, but the numbers are eyeball-popping. Still, it will most likely be settled for a tiny fraction of the requested amount.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

It is Monday Tuesday again and that means that it is time for another episode of the Copyright 2.0 Show.

Due to my attendance at WordCamp Dallas, this episode was recorded early and is being posted late so bear in mind that there is a lot of news this podcast won’t cover. So please be forgiving if we miss the story you are dying to hear about. We’ll get it next time!

All in all, there were twelve stories this week including news from all over the copyright world including our “Weird Story of the Week”.

This week’s stories include:

• Pirate Bay Judge Found to be Unbiased
• Rapidshare Get Hit with a Heavy Judgement
• German MP Joints Pirate Party
• EA Says “Pirate Our Games”
• Can You Be Served via Facebook?
• And Many more…

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

1: The Pirate Bay Sold For $7.8 Million

First off today is the big news that has everyone talking, The Pirate Bay, the infamous bittorrent tracker that is the subject of the criminal trial in Sweden, has been sold to a Swedish software company called Global Gaming Factory for a sum that approximately equals $7.8 million.

The sum seems low for a site that is one of the top 100 sites on the Web, but it seems likely that the lower price is due to the recent criminal case as well as the civil one against it. However, the sale price does more than double the $3.5 million verdict against them, so long as the labels don’t win their push to raise the fines.

There is a lot of uncertainty as to what this will mean for The Pirate Bay moving forward. There is some talk that they will be moving their Bittorrent tracker to another service and the CEO of Global Caming Factory said that he was working to have The Pirate Bay “introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” No one seems to really know what will happen next.

For their part, The Pirate Bay admins have said that the profits from the sale will “go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets.”

More information will likely be forthcoming over the next few days.

2: Tighter copyright law could save newspapers: Connie Schultz

Connie Schultz, a columnist for The Plain Dealer, hypothesizes in a editorial on her newspaper’s site that what newspapers need to survive is tougher copyright law to battle back against aggregates and other “freeloaders”, which would apparently include this column on Plagiarism Today.

According to Schultz, the only way that newspapers can survive is if copyright law is broadened to allow newspapers to protect themselves against aggregators and others that report on and link to their content. Since those sites are able to report on the content for a fraction of the cost, they dilute the advertising market and are still able to turn a profit, all while not doing anything to pay for the reporting.

Schultz wants tighter copyright law to block this behavior and revenue-sharing deals with aggregators to help prop up the newspapers. Whether this will actually work, however, remains to be seen.

3: Microsoft Bing accused of ‘plagiarism’

Finally today, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is being accused by airfare-finding service Kayak of being too similar to their own. The complaints mostly center around the layout and features of Bing’s similar flight research tool, which uses sliders and checboxes to help focus in on the needed flights.

It is unclear if this is a copyright issue or even if any of the alleged similarities are copyrightable in the least, but Kayak has sent a letter to Microsoft expressing concern over this issue and Microsoft has also issues a stern denial, saying that all of the work was done in house by them and farecast.com, which the own.

More on this situation as it develops, if it does.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

Hello everyone. I apologize in advance for the lack of updates today as there won’t be a 3 Count column or the usual PT update. I am currently scrambling like a madman to finish all of my preparations for WordCamp Dallas. I’m heading up this evening and will be gone through Monday afternoon so there won’t be any formal updates between now and then.

However, there are several ways you can follow along and get updates while I’m gone.

1. You can follow me on my Twitter account as I’ll be posting updates from the road the entire time I’m gone.
2. GeekBrief.TV will be livestreaming the entire event so you’ll likely be able to catch at least some of my presentation that way. I am currently scheduled for 2:30 PM CT (3:30 PM ET) on Saturday.
3. I’ll be updating this post closer in with the actual slides from my talk so you can download them and even follow along.

Also, due to the scheduling difficulties, Patrick O’Keefe and I will be doing a special edition of the Copyright 2.0 Show at 10:30 AM CT (11:30 AM CT) today. Feel free to join us via Talkshoe for the live recording. However, the show most likely will not be posted until Tuesday so be prepared for a delay in getting it online.

On that note, thank you very much for your patience and I look forward to seeing many of you at WordCamp Dallas in a few days!

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

Chris Anderson is the editor for Wired Magazine, a prominent tech journalist and a long-time advocate of the “free” business model. His upcoming book, enttield “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” has been the talk of many in the tech sectors as it deals with the idea of giving content away for free and then earning a living through other means.

However, even before the book has been officially released, it has become mired in controversy. Waldo Jaquith of the Virginia Quarterly Review (VGR), a literary review journal associated with the University of Virginia, noticed similarities between some passages in Anderson’s book and other sources. After putting some passages through Google, he found over a dozen instances where it appears Anderson copied content from Wikipedia as well as other sources.

These allegations were furthered by Edward Champion on his site, who compared several more passages from other books and blog posts.

This has sparked a firestorm of controversy on both Twitter and the comments section of the VGR post.

Without actually looking at the work (I haven’t seen a copy of the book) or being able to do a formal plagiarism analysis, I can’t offer too much commentary, but I do want to briefly recap what has been said and what I think it means.

Both Sides

According to Jaquith, he performed a “cursory” search of the book after he, “checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book.” He repeatedly emphasizes that this is not an exhaustive search of the work as he did not have an electronic copy at his disposal.

Jaquith listed eight different examples where at least some text duplicated verbatim. The lengthiest case involved pages 41-42 in Anderson’s book, which appears to copy heavily from a Wikipedia entry about the origin of the expression “Free Lunch”. Both of the works cite an article in the New York Times about “Free Lunch” counters but there is copying that goes beyond that including several sentences that are copied verbatim and other passages that appear to be close paraphrases.

These accusations were furthered by Champion, who listed five more examples on his blog, each involving passages that appeared to have at least some level of copying.

In all of the cases, the amount of pure verbatim plagiarism is fairly small, however, in many cases the amount of editing and rewriting appeared to be very small, either changing a few words or removing passages for brevity.

Anderson, for his part, doesn’t deny having copied from the sources, but claims that he had intended to cite the sources involved. In a statement he released he said:

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources…

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions…

He went on to say that he “missed” some of the attributions, especially some of those from Wikipedia where there was no individual author to credit, and that he plans on publishing those notes online before the book is released.

In a separate statement, Anderson’s publisher, Hyperion, said the following:

We are completely satisfied with Chris Anderson’s response. It was an unfortunate mistake, and we are working with the author to correct these errors both in the electronic edition before it posts, and in all future editions of the book.

This, however, has not stopped the war of words taking place on various social news sites and in the comments of the original post. The debate has also caught the attention of the mainstream media, including mentions in The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun and the L.A. Times.

My Thoughts

Without having the work in front of me in an electronic format and only having these very limited samples, it is very hard for me to perform a thorough analysis. Given the fact that most of the plagiarism involved at least some rewriting, I would normally encourage both a thorough electronic analysis of the entire work and a close human one on suspect parts.

However, I can’t do that right now and all I have are the passages presented and Anderson’s side of the story. There is not enough here, by itself, to draw solid conclusions from, especially in the limited time I’ve had.

Indeed, Anderson’s story may have merit. If he’s able to produce the footnotes easily, it would indicate that he was keeping them and did, likely, intended them to be in the book (why keep footnotes if you aren’t planning on publishing them?).

But what I find curious is his claim that he and/or his publisher “decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources.”

This statement strikes me as odd for many reason. First, there is a well-established citation style for Web pages. Both MLA and APA styles have one. Wikipedia also provides links to each individual edit, making the argument about having to preserve the sources a difficult one. Of course, even without that there are plenty of on-demand caching services that could have helped.

Second, I don’t fully understand why Anderson or his publisher would decide to do away with the footnotes at the last minute. It’s unclear if this was a technical issue, a design choice or something other issue. Removing footnotes from a book and rewriting the body to include inline citations “at the 11th hour” is very unorthodox in my experience and it would seem to almost be an invitation for mistakes and problems.

Finally, and perhaps most worrisome, as I read through the amount of the copying in some of the sections and passages, there is far more verbatim copying and close paraphrasing than one would usually use with a simple footnote. Typically a footnote is designed more to cite the source of information, not a direct quote and Anderson’s mention of doing a “write-through” of some of the citations seems to be a very odd way to handle the problem.

In short, the attribution has to match the use and, in at least some of these instances, it doesn’t appear to me to be the case.

It is important to remember that this is not like the Maureen Dowd case where we are talking about one quote with omitted attribution, but about at least a dozen and, by Anderson’s own admission, there was a problem with the footnotes for the whole book that, clearly was not straightened out adequately.

There is no nice way to say this, at the very least this is very sloppy editing and research and, unfortunately, it paints a very negative picture of the book. Even though it doesn’t appear Anderson intended to plagiarize, his liberal copying and rewriting of other texts combined with the lack of thoroughness in attribution is, at best, extremely sloppy research.

Unfortunately, this issue severely undermines the message of his book, parts of which it seems like I was going to agree with.

Bottom Line

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Anderson’s copying truly rises to the level of malicious or even lazy plagiarism. The proper thing for the publisher to do would be to not release the book until these errors can be fixed. I recognize that it would probably mean destroying thousands of printed copies, but there is a very simple and serious problem with releasing it as is.

Wikipedia, operates under a Creative Commons BY-SA license, the same license as this site. The license not only has an attribution requirement, but the legal code requires the person using the content to “keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means.”

One could very easily, and likely successfully, argue that posting the attribution on a Web site separate from the book does not complete the CC license as it is not “reasonable to the medium or means”. In short, if one is able to show that this unattributed copying goes beyond fair use, it could be a copyright liability.

Other books, including Kaavya Viswanathan’s were cancelled for less (in Anderson’s defense, Viswanathan’s book was a work of fiction, leading to a higher expectation of originality) and a person claiming to be an editor in the comments said that he has had to kill more than a few books for similar offenses.

It would be both prudent legally and much more respectful to the original creators for the book to be held back until these issues can be fixed and the book be thoroughly checked for other possible un-cited quotes.

Though looking at the evidence I have in front of me, I can not honestly tell if this was a case of malicious plagiarism, sloppy editing or a very bad mistake, but it is clear that there are issues with the citations in this book that need to be fixed and waiting to correct the electronic version or make edits to the future editions is not enough.

The bottom line is that, if we accept Anderson’s story at face value (and we have no evidence to make us doubt it), whoever made the decision to drop the footnotes at the last minute made a very serious error, one that almost invited this kind of problem. Without looking at the original citations, I can’t make any hard judgements about whether the citation was appropriate for copying, but if we assume that it was, the decision to change systems at the last minute was an unmitigated disaster.

I would love to do a thorough plagiarism analysis of the book and would gladly do so if I could be provided a suitable copy but, in lieu of that, I would encourage the publisher to perform one of their own. There are plenty of tools out there that can perform one cheaply and quickly. Doing so could save the publisher a great deal of headaches down the road.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

1: Ouch! German Court Slams Rapidshare With $34 Million Fine

First off today, file hosting site Rapidshare, received a very painful judgment today as a court in its native Germany ordered it to pay €24 million ($34 million) in damages for its enabling of file sharing of some 5000 music tracks in GEMA’s catalog. GEMA is a copyright protection association that represents composers, lyricists, music publishers within the country.

The ruling now also requires Rapidshare to take down all copies of these works and to prevent copies of the works from being made available in the future. However, that will pose a very large technical challenge due to the nature of the site and the fact files are uploaded in many different formats.

This ruling was made possible due to a lack of safe harbor protection in Germany, which allows hosts to be held liable when a user infringes copyright through their service, even if they remove the specific files that are alleged to be infringing.

2: Record biz tries suing Irish ISPs into submission

Next up today, the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) filed lawsuits against two of Ireland’s largest ISPs in a bid to get them to disconnect alleged file sharers under a “three strikes” style regime.

This worked earlier with the ISP Eircom but the two latest subjects, BT Ireland and UPC Ireland, do not seem as interested in settling and have expressed a desire to actively fight these lawsuits.

Obviously, the laws in Ireland are a bit different than those in Germany but it remains to be seen what, if anything, will come of this lawsuit and what will happen to the Eircom arrangement should this one get tossed out.

3: Chris Anderson’s Free Contains Apparent Plagiarism and TV’s Hasselbeck accused of plagiarizing diet book

Finally today we have not one but two cases of accused plagiarism in the publishing world. The first involves Wired editor Chris Anderson, whose book “Free” is due out early next month and the second involved Elizabeth Hasselbeck and a lawsuit that has been filed against her over her new cookbook.

In the Anderson case, Waldo Jaquith at the Virginia Quarterly Review found what he called a series of about a dozen plagiarized passages lifted from a variety of sources but primarily Wikipedia. Anderson responded to the claims saying that the problem was caused by the publisher “lost the footnotes at the 11th hour” before publication and that the error would be fixed through the use of online footnotes.

Many remain very skeptical of this explanation.

Hasselbeck, on the other hand, is being sued by Susan Hassett, the author of a self-published book “Living with Celiac Disease” that she claims to have sent to Hasselbeck to encourage her to promote awareness of the condition. According to Hassett, Hasselbeck’s new book, “The G-Free Diet: A Gluten-Free Survival Guide,” borrows heavily from her work including, “Dozens of paraphrased as well as word-for-word regurgitations of phrases and scrupulously researched factual data entries.”

Celiac Disease, an condition both Hasset and Hasselbeck have, causes the body to be intolerant of glutens, thus requiring a modified diet. Hassett is also suing Hasselbeck’s publisher, Center Street Hachette, and her ghost-writer seeking damages and to stop the book’s distribution.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

Need a Copyright or Plagiarism Consultant? I am Here to Help.jonb1324cdr

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been writing a great deal about the importance of licensing your content. Last week I wrote a column about why you should always clearly license your work, no matter what terms you choose. I also announced my talk at WordCamp Dallas, which will be on getting free content for your site and will deal heavily with content licensing.

As a result of this, many people have been emailing me asking about how I feel they should license their content, in particular whether Creative Commons is right for them. However, sadly, some of these people I’ve had to dissuade from using it.

To give you an idea of where I am coming from, I am a huge supporter of Creative Commons and have licensed everything I have posted on my sites under one of their licenses since shortly after version 1.0 was launched in 2002. I recommend Creative Commons to almost everyone I meet and actively discourage people from creating their own licenses.

However, this doesn’t mean that CC is for everyone. Not everyone who posts their work online is a good candidate for CC nor should they use it. Not only can it hurt your livelihood, but using it incorrectly might also damage the Creative Commons cause by letting people walk away with an unwarranted negative impression of the licenses.

This is why, before putting the CC logo on your site and announcing your new terms, it is important to take a minute and ask yourself if it is really right for you.

The Debate Over Going “Green”

If you don’t operate a business on your site, licensing your content under a CC license probably is a “nothing to lose” situation, especially if you retain commercial interest in your work. However, if you do run a business or otherwise earn a living online, it is important to consider how your content being copied may help/hurt your bottom line.

In some cases, it may help a great deal. For example, with this site, my allowing of attributed copying of my articles have helped my writing here reach new audiences and, with it, my name and my consulting practices. However, if I sold the content on this site, for example, as an eBook, it might be very different as even non-commercial copying could take away from sales.

However, that isn’t always the case. There have been many books that have been released under a CC license, generating a large amount of free downloads, but still sold well in both hardcopy and Kindle formats. For example, all of Professor Lawrence Lessig’s books are licensed under a CC license (save Remix, which is awaiting the launch of the CC versionThe book is available under a CC license here) and all have sold well.

The question becomes simple, will allowing copying of your work, in particular non-commercial copying as you can refuse to allow commercial use, help or hurt you?

I often tell people to think of this in terms of file sharing. If there were a file sharing network dedicated to your type of content and it correctly attributed all of your work, would you gain or lose money from your work being on it? This really hinges on what your bigger problem is: Obscurity or customer conversion.

As Cory Doctorow points out, for most creatives, obscurity is the greatest obstacle. However, one does not have to be very famous for customer conversion to become a problem too. For example, an artist that becomes popular in a circle that sells stickers small prints may run into trouble if they CC license their work as users that may previously have been customers can simply print their own of reasonable quality and do so legally.

Though this is a problem whether or not a work is CC licensed, some people will always do as they please regardless of the terms, adding that level of permission can encourage the behavior and, in some cases, lead to other, less desirable copying due to confusion about the license.

In short, it is clear that some people gain a great deal of benefit from using a CC license, in addition to the idea of supporting the larger commons, but it isn’t right for everyone. The harder part is trying to determine which category any one person falls into.

Asking the Right Questions

When debating whether to use a CC license, I typically ask people the following questions:

1. Personal Satisfaction: Would other people copying your content with attribution give you a sense of personal satisfaction or would you be upset that people were benefing from your work, even if just non-commercially, without you being involved?
2. Business Model: Does your business model rely heavily upon you selling copies that would likely be easily replaced by free distribution? For example, are you musician that makes the bulk of their revenue from song sales rather than live performances?
3. Content Type: Would free copies of your work replace paid ones trivially? With some content a free copy just isn’t the same as a paid one. PDFs don’t replace physical books, for example. On the other hand, free MP3s are the exact same as paid ones. Also, how easily is attribution affixed to your content? Would it likely be lost as it is copied?
4. Audience Type: Is your audience fairly tech-savvy and likely to understand what a CC license is an how to follow it? Would they likely misinterpret it? Will they take advantage of it?
5. Search Engine Benefit: How ciritical is the content in question to your search engine ranking? Would the incoming links help more than the duplicated content? Though it is a minor issue if the content is correctly attributed and linked, it is important to consider, especially if your site is new and doesn’t have a lot of search engine recognition.

No one of these questions can answer whether a CC license is right for you. You have to weigh all of the factors and decide if, overall, it is better to have one or not.

However, the good news is that CC is not an all-or-nothing proposition. You can license items separately so long as you make it extremely clear what items are and are not covered. This means that, if you think it might be a good move, you can test it on a few of your works to see how well it goes. You can also reserve all the rights to your work initially and, once enough time has passed, place it under a CC license.

But while experimenting with CC may be a good idea for many, if not most, there are a few times to definitely stay away from it. For example, placing marketing copy under a CC license is dangerous as it also affects your trademark rights and is something that is supposed to uniquely identify your business. Likewise, content made at the request of a client, but you hold the rights to, should never be CC licensed without the client’s permission. Allowing copying of work created on someone else’s dime is poor form

Bottom Line

Most bloggers and most content creators have little to lose and, quite possibly, a great deal to gain from using CC licenses. Despite that though, it is worth taking a few minutes to reflect on how it will affect you both personally and business-wise before putting the logo on your site. Doing so serves both yourself and the efforts of the CC organization.

My personal experience has been pretty tepid. I’ve seen a lot of people use my content in ways that mesh with my licenses and many people violate them. I’m unsure if that usage would change any if I had removed the license, but it always helped me show people where the line was drawn and, when someone crossed it, provide guidance for making things right.

Also, there have been a few people that have been very aggressive about using my content correctly and doing so liberally. They’ve been the primary drivers in getting my work into new hands and, for that, I am grateful.

But even though the overall benefits to me have been rather modest, CC licensing can help others do more with their own work. As such, it is worth carefully considering and weighing the advantages of using it.

After all, to a creator CC licensing isn’t just about contributing to the commons, though it is a big part, it is also about ensuring that one’s content works as hard for its creator as the creator did in making it.

This is contrary to what Mark Helprin has to say.

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1: Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly

First off today, the Amazon Kindle is in the spotlight for a little bit of DRM fail. Blogger Dan Cohen from Gear Diary writes about a problem he had with his Kindle subscription after both getting a new iPhone and resetting both his iPod Touch and his iPhone for the new version of the operating system.

When Cohen went to re-download his books, he found that it couldn’t be done because he had run up against a cap on the number of downloads. Worse still, he found that the maximum number of downloads is not known, even to Amazon’s representatives, and there is no way for one to find out what the exact limit is.

This means that, when you buy a book on the Kindle, you have no way of knowing how many times you can download it, including for device updates, before you have to repurchase the book, something that has left Cohen, and many others, with a bad taste in their mouth.

2: Anti-Piracy Lawyers Lose License To Chase Pirates

Next up, if you’re a file sharer in Norway, you’re just a little bit safer today. The data protection law there instructs ISPs to delete IP data after three weeks and the only law firm that had a license to track pirates had their temporary license end without any renewal forthcoming. This means that, unless the law firm is successful with its objection, there will effectively be no way to track file sharers in Norway.

The reason, according to Torrentfreak, is because there was not a great deal of political debate over the collection of IP addresses and, without any guidance, the data protection authorities decided not to renew the license.

3: Obama in cyberspace

Finally today, author and copyright reform advocate James Boyle penned an article about how Obama’s copyright policies may shape up.

In the column, he first hints that Obama might have weighed multiple interests and been a truly fresh start in many ways for copyright but, in the end, recent indications about the appointment of Obama’s Copyright Czar and the administration’s opposition to exemptions to assist the visually impaired, according to Boyle, indicate that his is, more or less, towing the industry line.

Obviously this is a disappointment to Boyle and many who voted for Obama expecting such reforms.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today, we’ll be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Saturday morning for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Monday morning right here on Plagiarism Today.

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