mightyfastpig

12:02 am: How NOT to use a Creative Commons license
Charlie Stross's new science fiction novel Accelerando is being simultaneously released under a Creative Commons license. All well and good, as I'm always glad to see more material CC'ed. I'm currently working on a proposal for a book that will, if published, be CC'ed as well.

However, I'm puzzled by the attitude that comes with Stross' announcement about the CC license.

What this means in a nutshell is: you can download it. You can read it, and give a copy (under exactly the same terms) to your friends. You must not sell it, modify it (other than converting to a different file format for storage or reading) or file off the serial numbers and pretend you wrote it. You must specifically not create derivative works such as movies or TV adaptations or role-playing games or translations into other languages, without obtaining a separate commercial license. If you do any of these things, I and/or my agent and publishers will come after you with lawyers, guns, and money -- but mostly lawyers.


Now, Stross the author of the work has the right to give away precisely those rights he wants to. That's the whole point of Creative Commons. He also has the right to mock-threaten his readership. But why does he want to? There's no need for there to be an adversarial relationship between the creator of a text and the audience.

Furthermore, Stross should be so lucky that people want to make deriviative works based on his novel. When a text can capture people's imagination enough to prompt them to expand upon it, that's a rare and unusual success.

Cory Doctorow sounded eager when he talked about CC-licensing his stories and novels, like he wanted to offer his work up to the general public and have them embrace it and send it to friends, and later he changed the licensing so that fans could create deriviative works. Stross sounds strangely reluctant.

Tags: creative commons, publishing, science fiction

11:59 pm: Publishing for screen
While reading about Richard Kadrey's new Creative Commons-licensed novel, Blind Shrike, I followed a link to an article about how the 5 MB PDF file of the novel was specifically formatted for ease of reading on the screen.

John D Berry designed to open in landscape mode, with a very light tan background, Verdana font, and it is also set to open in full screen mode at 125% magnification.

But for people who haven't played around much with Acrobat or Adobe Reader, full-screen mode can be confusing. "How do I get out of this?" they may ask, not seeing any of their familiar tools and menus. It may not even be obvious how to move to the next page. (There are many ways, including pressing Return, using the direction arrows, and clicking anywhere on the screen. Experiment a little.)

As I've noticed while helping my mother, father and other older relatives with computer problems, "experiment a little" is what a lot of people are extremely reluctant to do when it comes to computer tech. They view the computer with fear and suspicion, and believe that any misstep will result in a massive disaster. Frankly, what separates me from them is less a matter of knowledge than a lack of apprehension. Some technical problems I solve because I am unafraid to just poke around menus and options until I see something workable.

By making a radical break from how most people will read something online, Berry shoots his project in the foot. Deliberately disobeying how most applications in a PC environment appear and behave will alienate both casual and expert users.

Furthermore, one of the reasons for digitally publishing something under a Creative Commons license is to separate the mesage from the medium. Blind Shrike does not only exist in an awkwardly large PDF file. It can be printed or viewed on a handheld device or run through a text-to-speech application or blown up for the visually impaired or punched into Braille or transcribed by hand on vellum and bound in leather. Some readers would rather use it as a 200kb plain text file they can easily view on their second-hand Palm.

Berry's format is nice, and I appreciate the effort, but it should be just one way of viewing Kadrey's book, a mode you can turn off and on. Kadrey should not restrict his work by tying it to one format, and the reader should be free to pick the display format that is most suitable.

Tags: creative commons, publishing