[open-science] SPARC author addendum uses CC-NC licence and now all hybrid publishers have followed

[Heather Morrison]

On 11-Dec-11, at 3:07 PM, Thomas Kluyver wrote:

On 11 December 2011 22:14, Heather Morrison <heatherm at eln.bc.ca> wrote:
CC, NC, and scholarly blogs - an emerging format that we need to think  
about, and would be impacted if CC were to drop NC. Someone please  
correct me if I am wrong: I assume that if my blog license were  
changed to CC-BY, then someone else could set up a mirror site, turn  
on Adsense, and keep the revenue for themselves. To me, this would be  
offensive, take away a source of potential revenue I might actually  
need someday, and quite possibly decrease my own blog stats - a  
measure that some of us might wish to use to show the value of this  
more open approach. For all these reasons, if CC-NC disappears, then  
CC will disappear from my blog, and I will happily go back to  
automatic copyright or a more restrictive license, as these would be  
my best options.

But:
* These hypothetical stealing bloggers still need to say where it's  
come from, and if you do a decent job at promoting your own site, it  
should get most of the visitors, appear higher in search rankings, and  
so on. There are sites out there that just mirror Wikipedia for  
profit, but none of them have made much of an impact, as far as I know.

Comment: why would I want to put myself in a position where I might  
have to compete with someone copying my blog? Much easier to license  
NC - or all rights restricted, if CC takes this option away from me.  
This won't necessarily stop people, but at least it tells anyone who  
pays attention that this is not okay.

* No other blogger can repost any copyrightable part of your work  
(like a diagram you've drawn) if their blog is also ad supported. To  
my mind, this sort of reuse is a key part of what open access aims to  
allow.

Comment: if I have licensed my work as CC-BY, then re-use is allowed,  
and for commercial purposes. Does this not mean that others can take  
my work and create derivates, such as an ad-filled copy? How so?

* Tools such as RSS aggregators or Readability will already deprive  
you of ad revenue, however you license your content. It's impossible  
to force people to read things on your site, with your ads beside them.

Comment: this is an interesting point. At any rate, my reasons for  
preferring NC are not restricted to web ads. For example, I might want  
to create and sell a book.

best,

Heather Morrison