From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 29 May 2015 10:43:13 +0000

Sandy's point reminded me of a CC-BY story. A couple of years ago we
published a book on behalf of UNESCO who had just adopted a policy of
using CC-BY on all their works. About six months after publication,
the authors called us because they had discovered a version of their
publication as an Amazon Kindle Edition, available for sale from
Amazon. They weren't troubled by the fact that Amazon was selling the
work, what upset them was the quality of the Kindle edition. It seems
that Amazon had downloaded the PDF from UNESCO's website and had
converted it somehow into a Kindle edition. In this process, the page
layout sort of fell apart and the overall qualitative presentation was
pretty poor. We wondered if Amazon had developed a CC-BY-seeking robot
out to sniff out works like this and had an automatic process that
converted them to Kindle because the poor quality suggested that no
human had checked it before it was offered for sale.

The authors asked us to issue Amazon with a take-down notice because
they felt the poor quality of this version of their work might reflect
badly on them. We explained that Amazon had done nothing wrong under
the terms of a CC-BY licence and that we could do nothing. As Sandy
says, be careful what you wish for.

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
OECD


> On 29 May 2015, at 00:28, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 28 May 2015 09:13:34 -0500
>
> To Stevan's objection I would add that such a statement as this is
> ridiculously overreaching:
>
> At 6:49 PM -0400 5/27/15, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>>
>> We do not believe that scientific, economic and social progress should be hindered in order to protect commercial interests.
>
> It just so happens that university presses have "commercial interests"
> also. If taken literally, this statement advocates stealing everything
> that university presses publish.
>
> I would also second Stevan's point about CC-BY-NC-ND. I have argued
> elsewhere that humanists especially are not well served by just CC-BY
> alone because they have an interest in making sure that their writing
> is translated correctly and CC-BY provides no protection against
> sloppy and poor translation.  Moreover, insisting on CC-BY for OA
> monographs would undercut one business model that has been used
> successfully by university presses (like the one I directed at Penn
> State) to  make OA monograph publishing possible.
>
> Be careful what you wish for!
>
> Sandy Thatcher