Google Books Offers Creative Commons Licensing
Earlier this morning Google Books announced a program where rights owners would be given the option to modify their copyright licenses and specify them as Creative Commons (CC) works. The initiative allows writers, artists and publishers to mark their books with one of 6 CC version 3 licenses, a public domain license or the CC "no rights reserved" license.
In the last few months Creative Commons has celebrated some benchmark programs with large-scale publishers including perhaps the most notable event, Wikipedia's community-wide adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
The addition of Google Books as a partner is a significant one as the search giant's involvement promises to increase the public's ability to find works to share and remix. For now, CC licensed books are distinguishable by a Creative Commons logo to the left of the preview pane. In the future, licensing is likely to become an advanced search feature within the site. When that happens, remixing material will be so much easier to find.
For example, Google already prints full versions of out-of-copyright books for its Library Project. Once these books are tagged with the public domain license, thousands of out-of-copyright and sometimes out-of-print books will become easily searchable. We may see a renewed interest in our favorite classics, or see them altered in new and unusual ways. By showcasing CC licensed material, Google Books may prompt other companies like Flickr to further prioritize commons-friendly search.
If you'd like to place your Google Book under a CC license, you can do so in your account settings. To sign up to add a CC licensed work, visit the Google Books partner page
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Our destiny offers not the cup of despair , but the chalice of opportunity .
yes, sir
Folks,
Before you decide on how to approach this option from Google, please be sure to get all sides of the story. I'm a vice president of the National Writers Union UAW 1981, the only labor union for writers. We've been investigating this for a while. If you'd like to read more about the settlement and its options for writers, please look at our website, www.nwu.org or check out the website from our Boston chapter, www.nwuboston.org, before making any decisions.
Thank you.
Just imagine the possibilities. Very, very exciting.
I'm a vice president of the National Writers Union UAW 1981, the only labor union for writers. We've been investigating this for a while.
Excellent work!
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Thanks for this post.