San Francisco — Google Inc. is now proposing a novel concept to authors and publishers who wish to release their work under Creative Commons licenses to distribute it through Google Books, an unpaid service that allows users to search and read books online, allowing rights owners the option to modify their copyright licenses and specify them as Creative Commons (CC) works.
The initiative allows right owners such as: writers, artists and publishers who want to circulate their books that enable users to download, use and share, should mark their books with one of 6 CC version 3 licenses, a public domain license or the CC “no rights reserved” license.
If rights-holders are already incorporated as part of Google’s partner program, they can update their available books under CC by modifying their account settings. Alternatively, they can also sign up to become a partner. There are seven different CC licenses to categories to choose from, and usage permissions vary among them.
“Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to inform readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books,” says Google Books Associate Product Manager Xian Ke. “You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There is even a license to dedicate your book to the public domain.”
Creative Commons is a nonprofit group that inspires writers, artists and others to use its licensing tools to offer their piece of work to be reused and shared by others in certain ways.
During the past few months Creative Commons has enjoyed some of the benchmark programs with large-scale publishers including perhaps the most notable event, Wikipedia’s community-wide adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
The inclusion of Google Books as a partner is certainly an important one as the search giant’s participation promises to increase the common people’s ability to find works to share and remix.
For example, Google already lists full versions of out-of-copyright titles for its Library Project. Once these books are marked with the public domain license, thousands of out-of-copyright and sometimes out-of-print books will become easily search-able. Presently, CC licensed books are easily distinguished by a Creative Commons logo to the left of the preview pane. In the future, licensing is likely to become an advanced search feature within the site. When that happens, remixing material will be so much easier to find.
“And if the rights owners has consented to allow people to download, share and modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube,” says Ke.
As for those who download these books will be agreeing that they will only use them in the ways the license says they may. This could include giving the author credit if they remix the work or distribute it publicly, Ke wrote.