Nebraska library adopts CC
Mark one small victory for supporters of Creative Commons, the alternative licensing protocol that gives authors more freedom to dictate restrictions on their work. As reported on the Nebraska Library Commission blog, several CC titles are now registered in its catalogue – including PDF versions and several spiralbound editions. Apparently, processing the titles presented some problems for the library’s fastidious staff.
Not being a cataloger myself I can’t give a completely accurate accounting of what I put our cataloger through, but I owe her a lunch. Some of the questions raised by these items were just who the “publisher” was and what should be listed as the publisher’s “location.” Larger issues such as whether these were newly unique editions or just reprints of a previously released edition also needed to be addressed. Discussion ensued and decisions were made. Are the records perfect, I’ll leave that for others to judge.
The newly catalogued titles include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow; Trigger Happy by Stephen Poole; Shike by Robert J. Shea; My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust; and The Future of Ideas, Code Version 2.0, and Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who created the protocol.
(Thanks to Bookninja for the link.)
Creative Commons does nothing of the sort. Your work has exactly the same rights under copyright law with or without Creative Commons, which enables you to preauthorize uses of that work. (It’s about authorizations, not restrictions.) The set of possible uses is never larger than that provided by copyright law.
Incidentally, not everyone agrees with Creative Commons.