I had a fun conversation with John Pettigrew on his ‘Talking Through My Hat‘ publishing podcast recently. If you’re in book publishing, his series is worth subscribing to. He has regular conversations with wonderful publishing entrepreneurs, including Michael Bhaskar of Canelo, Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, and Emma Barnes of Consonance.
Tag Archives: Bettercare
The way to talk about open licensing is to not talk about open licensing
Open-licensing can be incredibly powerful. Converts to open-licensing become zealots quickly, because they can see that a world that is open-by-default is a healthier world.
The problem with open-licensing is that it’s hard to describe. Evangelism is incredibly difficult. Those of us familiar with copyright law and licensing tend to forget that phrases like ‘open-license’, ‘Creative Commons’, ‘CC-BY’, ‘No-derivatives’, and ‘copyleft’ are opaque to most people. Our challenge is to find ways to talk about open-licensing without ever saying ‘license’.
At Bettercare and at Book Dash we use Creative Commons licenses for our publications. At Bettercare, we use a CC-BY-ND-NC license strategically. It’s very important that our customers and competitors know exactly what that means, and why we’re doing it. At Book Dash, we use CC-BY to make sure our books can travel as widely and cheaply as possible. We rely on lots of volunteers, and can’t waste time explaining the technicalities of open-licensing to them.
Over the last few months, I’ve worked hard to remove the jargon from our messaging. Our Bettercare page on licensing is called ‘Reusing our materials’, and starts like this:
Unlike most publishers, we let you make your own copies of our material for free, under certain circumstances. So, in certain special cases, you can reuse or share our books without asking for our permission.
If you follow these three simple rules, you can re-use or copy our books without asking for permission:
- Each copy must say where it came from: Bettercare, including the bettercare.co.za web address.
- You can’t change anything. You must reuse or copy the books as-is. This protects us and our authors from liability, should others’ changes be in any way dangerous or harmful.
- You cannot reuse or copy them for a money-making activity. This is to protect our financial sustainability. There is more detail about this below.
We go into more detail in plain-language. It’s not perfect, but we’re on the right track. You can read the whole thing here.
At Book Dash, we focus on two phrases: ‘books that anyone can freely download, translate and distribute’ and ‘our work is our gift to the world’. We only use technical terms like ‘Creative Commons’ when there is space and time to do it properly.
If you’ve worked on translating open-licensing jargon into plain language, please let me know.