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Everyone's An Expert (Just Not On Copyright Law)
Interesting dust-up brewing this morning. In one corner is Seth Godin. In the other? "BNPublishing." (Whoever they are.)
Apparently, BNPublishing has taken Seth's free Everyone's An Expert e-Book, repackaged it, and is now selling it through Amazon, eBay, and one would presume other outlets. A quick dig this morning on the BNPublishing website seems to show their business model as taking non-rights-protected works and packaging them up for easy sale. For example, they are also selling titles such as The Art of War and the like on their site.
The issue: Everyone's An Expert was released under a CreativeCommons-Attribution-2.5 license, which allows commercial usage.
(There is another license, CreativeCommons-Attribution-NonCommercial-2.5, that precludes commercial usage. But that's not the license that was used.)
Any experts out there? Are there other aspects (e.g. trademark) that would prevent this?
Not sure, but I think Seth might be out of luck on this one. YAFLE.
(N.B. Not a lawyer, etc.)
Update: MindBlogging has a similar take.
February 10, 2007 | Permalink
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Comments
Well, the attribution license reserve's the author's right to specify how attribution is to be made. Most people don't bother to say, and Seth might have left it open. So, how did the republisher of the book provide attribution, if at all?
That could be relevant but not the sort of thing that would likely produce an injunction against the publisher.
Posted by: orcmid | Feb 10, 2007 1:04:29 PM
all i've seen so far is the cover via the amazon site, on which it does say "by seth godin." attribution beyond that? don't know.
Posted by: christopher carfi | Feb 10, 2007 2:13:26 PM
Looking at the license it states: "For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work."
Nowhere on the Amazon page do I see text that describes the license.
Posted by: Patrick Fitzgerald | Feb 11, 2007 7:57:09 AM
