Michael Mandiberg, How to Negotiate a Creative Commons License: Ten Steps, 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 CClicense 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. …
[Thanks to Open Access News]
