Google Books opening to Creative Commons licensed properties
Via Cynopsis Digital: Google is now enabling authors
and publishers who sign off under various
Creative Commons licenses to
distribute their works for free using the Google Books platform. The highest profile comic-book that would be immediately eligible for inclusion would be Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now comic miniseries from IDW Publishing.
The
Creative Commons organization has been busy this year launching programs
like the
Attribution-ShareAlike agreement with Wikipedia that enables
interoperability between Wikipedia licenses. This new alliance allows
independent writers, artists and publishers, both existing Google
Partners and
non-partners, to distribute, commercialize and protect the reuse of their
works. It’s a flexible license built for the digital age, with settings
that authorize creative remixes and mash-ups that give credit where
credit is due.
Books that have been made available under a CC license
have been marked with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation
bar, allowing users to download the books and share them freely. “If
the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers
can even create a mashup - say, translating the book into Esperanto,
donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on
YouTube,” writes Xian Ke, Associate Product manager, Google Books in
a
blog post.
Google says representatives of the
Book Rights Registry
intend to allow rightsholders to distribute CC-licensed works for free,
pending court approval of a settlement. In the meantime, Creative Commons
proponents such as
Lawrence Lessig have make their works available on Google Books using
the CC licenses.