There’s an interesting dust-up between marketing guru Seth Godin and an entrepreneur who is selling paperback copies of an e-book Godin published on the Web two years ago using a Creative Commons license.
On his blog, Godin is asking people not to buy the book. Apparently, sales of the book are so strong that Amazon is recommending it in e-mails to customers who’ve bought similar books in the past.
“I didn’t authorize this book to be published, I have no idea who the publisher is and I certainly didn’t ask Amazon to email anyone,” Godin says on his blog.
Godin admits, however, that the Creative Commons license he selected for his book didn’t preclude commercial republication.
When I published my own book this month using a Creative Commons license, I selected the most restrictive license. It allows printing and sharing of the material, but no commercial use and no derivative works.
If you want to avoid the type of trouble Godin is having, but still want to use a Creative Commons license, consider the using the Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives license.
UPDATE: It looks like Amazon has taken down the listing for the book, but it remains here in Google’s cache. It had a pretty darned good Amazon Sales Rank of around 3,000.
One Comment
Yes, the book did have pretty strong uptake as evident in this sales rank chart. The chart is available for only for 12-16 Feb. as it seems to have been removed from Amazon database.