BUT

If the same book is free to download and published with CC non commercial by Random House, the chances for pirate publishing are much smaller. A big publisher may want to give a public example. No SugarLandPress-like would want to be sued.

I should have listened to my gut instincts about CC to begin with.

I was trying to come up with a way to make it easy for people to distribute something I made free in PDF to others without feeling like they were “pirating” because the whole purpose of KEPT was to start building audience, the money part comes next.

In future I won’t do something like that again. I think CC could cause more harm ultimately than good over the long term. I think there are many ways to manipulate it and abuse it, which I won’t mention here lest I give people with no moral compass ideas to screw me over with.

I think it’s a bit of both, people deliberately stealing and people who just don’t really understand that CC does not mean public domain.

Just my opinion though. And I would definately leave a review on that unauthorized copy stating that you are the actual author and copyright owner and that despite what the matter page states, the product for sale was not authorized by you. I would also point them in the direction of the real copy.

In this case, it seems not like a misunderstanding of CC license law but deliberate theft of another’s intellectual property rights. The fact that they blatantly made claim to the copyright by using the term “all rights reserved” which when it comes to a CC license, the author does lose the “all rights” clause, but the end user does not gain them.

One might think that this person is stupid beyond belief, but the intentional subterfuge leads me to believe that they know what they are doing: theft.

I think the Creative Commons has its palce in the world, I just think authors need to be careful with CC licensing and make sure they choose the right license. Some sites like Scribd default to a flat out CC (attribution only) license. It’s a tricky multi-screen process, and eager writers might not notice what they have done until too late. Not to mention most readers are just as uneducated about CC licensing, and the ones that are know exactly what they can get away with.

I know of another author this week who has two Kindle versions of her title out there: one is the original and the other is a reader who downloaded the free copy from Scribd and decided to sell it on Amazon. the author admitted that with the license she chose, there is nothing she can do about it beyond leaving a review stating that it is not the authorized version. She did gain readership from the free-share content, but the violation she feels and the lost of revenue on her own work is quite frustrating to deal with. I am sure that book is the last thing she will release with a CC license.

But this case is different. This time we’ve got somebody, who is on purpose changing the license from CC to (C) – to be perceived as a serious publisher. So they take CC work (that’s OK) and change rules (tha’s not OK).

What really bothers me is this attitude “how to cheat everybody”. If anyone says “hey, you’re not allowed to do this”, they’ll respond “but this is CC and we didn’t know”. They want to cheat also with this:

“You should assume that the author and publisher have an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to the providers of goods and services mentioned in this report and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider.”
Oh, those guys make their own rules, based on an assumption, that and author MAY want to link to their book as an affiliate (otherwise this doesn’t make any sense). So they feel fully justified to do what they do: they create a possibility for an author to sell his book. He should be grateful for it! Insane.

Walt Gordon Jones explains everything nicely on his site in simple terms, and he has some suggestions for attacking the issue you have at present. You are still the legal copyright owner. CC doesn’t replace that. Good luck. Drop me a line and let me know what happened.

http://waltgordonjones.com/104/some-rights-reserved-a-creative-commons-survival-guide