From: Eric Hellman <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 19:12:43 -0400

Toby Green's comment draws a conclusion that may propagate an
incorrect understanding of CC-BY.

In fact, the same situation could have occurred for CC-BY-SA and
CC-BY-ND, as all the CC licenses allow for format conversion, even bad
format conversion. Without this provision, the book would be doomed to
go dark when PDF or whatever becomes obsolete.

Also, what OECD should have done is put the book into a good Kindle
Edition themselves. To tell the authors that nothing could be done was
a disservice.

Eric

Eric Hellman
President, Gluejar.Inc.
Founder, Unglue.it https://unglue.it/
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/
twitter: @gluejar

> On May 30, 2015, at 11:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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