Publish or perish

As someone who has published a couple of academic articles, and is writing more, I'm all for proactive, author-controlled, management of the rights to a work. As you surf through the blogosphere* you'll find a lot of sites that are displaying Creative Commons licenses. Yet you won't find one here, or at least not so far. I'm yet to make up my mind about how I feel about having a Creative Commons license for my writing here. And my suspicion is that while some bloggers may have thought these issues through to their conclusion, others have signed up without realising the implications of the act.

The Creative Commons project states that it is “devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.” The purpose of a Creative Commons license is to indicate the ways in which you are happy for others to use your material. I think the project is excellent and I wholeheartedly support the thoughtful application of their licenses by an author. Did you understand, though, that in most countries an individual's work is already copyrighted from the moment it is stored in some crystallised form? In fact, that's what Creative Commons is trying to address. The purpose is not to establish any rights for the author (you already have them under law) but rather to selectively sign them away.

What prompted me to say all this then? Dave draws attention to the recent experience of Steve over at e~mergent kiwi. Steve was writing an article for Reality Magazine on Mel Gibson's new movie “The Passion of Christ", and posted a draft to his weblog for feedback. He's now upset because some people copied the draft article and emailed it to other people. I understand him being upset, because his expectation was that people would ask him before redistributing his material, especially in this case as he had indicated it was an early draft.

The problem is, Steve has declared on his site that the material there is covered by a Creative Commons license, which reserves some rights, but grants others. This license requires him to be identified as the author of this work, and has a number of other stipulations, but reviewing it (and the full legalese) it is clear that you are not either requested or required to ask his permission before using the work. In fact, the reverse is true. Employing a Creative Commons license is a proactive way for an author to grant permissions so others do not have to ask before copying it. (See the Creative Commons Professor Isaac story for an example.) The license Steve selected clearly states that anyone is free “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and “to make derivative works."

Someone forwarded Steve's draft to Reality magazine apparently, who were unhappy it was being pre-published elsewhere. (An unsurprising response from print media, perhaps?) They contacted Steve, who seems to have been left feeling more than a bit burned. The fact is though, Steve published it under a license that gave people permission to copy the article however they liked, providing they linked back to the source, and included a link to the license. (I'll bet none did the latter, and only some did the former, but that's a slightly different story.) Here I therefore have to disagree with Dave. Copying this work without asking Steve's specific permission was not in any way unethical, because Steve had granted advance permission to everyone to copy and use his work. Furthermore, the license is not revocable, so even now that he has expressed disappointment that the work has been distributed, that does not in fact change the rights he has given for it to be distributed. (Admittedly I personally wouldn't continue to distribute an author's work under those circumstances, usually.)

The big pity here is that Steve has been burned, and the outcome is not what he as the author intended. Steve definitely needs to review his Creative Commons license, because it appears to not describe his true intentions as the author of the blog. It isn't possible to change the license applied to previous entries, but he could consider a different approach for future material.

Ironically, I've been reflecting on these issues for some time because I have in some senses the opposite problem to Steve. When I write an academic article, I'd like it to be available to as wide an audience as possible. However, for a paper to gain credibility it has to be published in a recognised professional journal. Authors receive no payment for publication in scholarly journals, but are required to sign over copyright that grants the publisher almost exclusive publication rights to the paper. The author is given limited permission to personally distribute copies of the paper. What I want to do however is to have pdfs of my papers available on my own web site should anyone wish to access them. I have not done this yet, partly because I am not too sure that this is allowed. Yet as the author of the work, surely this should be my moral right? And with the increasing development of web-based publishing, this issue is only going to get bigger in years to come.

Condolences, Steve. I look forward to reading the “Letter to Mel...” when it is published. We're all learning in this New Media world.