This is an example of what Cory means when he says that copyright will ultimately make criminals out of all of us if we don't re-draw the boundary between the public domain and the private interest of everyone involved in copyright—from actual content creators to rent-seeking owners of the rights to stuff they've somehow acquired the legal title to.
I'm not encouraging you to make copies of stuff other people made and to sell them for a profit without giving payback to the original creators and the publishers who helped edit and produce the work. That's not cool, unless the creators explicitly said you could do that. But if your shoes pinch, it might be a sign that you need to try out a better-fitting pair, and we're trying to help with that.
ABOUT DERIVATIVE WORKS
Cory's previous books have been released under a slightly different Creative Commons license, one that allowed for derivative works (that is, new creative works based on this one). Keen observers will have already noticed that this book is licensed "NoDerivs"—that is, you can't make remixes without permission.
Cory says:
A word of explanation for this shift is in order. When I first started publishing under Creative Commons licenses, I had to carefully explain this to my editor and publisher at Tor Books. They were incredibly forward-looking and gave me permission to release the first-ever novel licensed under CC—my debut novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This ground-breaking step was only possible because I was able to have intense, personal discussions with my publisher.
My foreign rights agents are the inestimable Danny and Heather Baror, and collectively they have sold my books into literally dozens of countries and languages, helping to bring my work to places I couldn't have dreamed of reaching on my own. They subcontract for my agent Russell Galen, another inestimable personage without whom I would not have attained anything like the dizzy heights that I enjoy today. They attend large book fairs in cities like Frankfurt and Bologna in order to sell the foreign rights to my books, often negotiating with one of a few English-speakers at a foreign press, who then goes back and justifies her or his decisions to the rest of the company.
The point is that this is nothing like my initial Creative Commons discussion with Tor. That was me sitting down and making the case to editors I've known for years (my editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, has known me since I was 17). My foreign rights are sold by a subcontractor of my representative to a representative of a press I've often never heard of, who then has to explain my publishing philosophy to people I've never met, using a language I don't speak.
This is hard.
Danny and Heather have asked—not demanded, asked!—that I consider publishing books under a NoDerivs license, so that I can consult with them before I authorize translations of my books. They want to be able to talk to potential foreign publishers about how this stuff works, to give me time to talk with them, to ease them into the idea, and to have the kind of extended conversation that helped me lead Tor into their decision all those years ago.
And I agreed. Free/open culture is something publishers need to be led to, not forced into. It's a long conversation that often runs contrary to their intuition and received wisdom. But no one gets into publishing to get rich. Working in the publishing industry is virtually a vow of poverty. The only reason to get into publishing is because you flat-out love books and want to make them happen. People work in publishing for the same reason writers write: they can't help themselves.
So I want to be able to have this conversation, personally, unhurriedly, one-to-one. I want to keep all the people involved in my books—agents, subagents, foreign editors and their bosses—in the loop on these discussions. I will always passionately advocate for CC licensing in all of my work. I promise you that if you write to me with a request for a noncommercial derivative use, that I will do everything in my power to see that it is authorized.
And in the meantime, I draw your attention to article 2 of all Creative Commons licenses:
Nothing in this License is intended to reduce, limit, or restrict any uses free from copyright or rights arising from limitations or exceptions that are provided for in connection with the copyright protection under copyright law or other applicable laws.
Strip away the legalese and what that says is, "Copyright gives you, the public, rights. Fair use is real. Fair dealing is real. Decop minimum exemptions to copyright are real. You have the right to make all sorts of uses of all copyrighted works, without permission, without Creative Commons licenses.
Rights are like muscles. When you don't exercise them, they get flabby. Stop asking for stuff you can take without permission. Please!
(And, for the record, Charlie agrees.)
DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS
Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.
But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.
Here's the deaclass="underline" there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself here).
There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.
I'm proposing that we put them together.
If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of Rapture of the Nerds, email freerotnbook@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to http://craphound.com/rotn/donate/ by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.
If you enjoyed the electronic edition of Rapture of the Nerds and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/rotn/donate/ and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freerotnbook@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.
I've done this with eight of my titles now, and gotten more than a thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this—one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?