The legality of media sharing has always been a hot topic especially when it comes to books; publishing houses and authors are pretty touchy with rights and licensing agreements. But Unglue.it wants to change this by easing their concerns and bringing free e-books to the masses with a little help from Creative Commons.
The Media-Sharing Superstar
Creative Commons is helping you share your creativity and knowledge with the world by developing, supporting and supervising legal and technical infrastructure. It’s an amazing platform that is not only fostering innovation and creativity but it is creating transparency in large companies for public access. More knowledge is power. That sounds like a “stay in school” campaign from the 90s, but I digress.
You don’t need to register to use Creative Commons licenses, you simply select from six licenses that suit your goals, and allowing others to see the terms of the license of your choice. In other words, it allows you to shft from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” letting you choose your own terms for sharing.
You can search for CC licensed works (music, video, writing, etc) through sources such as Google, Flickr and YouTube.
Creative Commons has conducted case studies on many of their superstar CC licensed works so others can create their own business model or simply be inspired. Their case studies include:
- Tumblr
- The White House (really)
- Jonathan Coulton
- Huffington Post
And now the Unglue.it team also wants to join our media-sharing friend to bring the world free CC licensed e-books.
Unglue.it and the Free e-book Campaign
I applaud any platform that has a mission to change the world in a positive way, you know, like making it free to access books (digitally).
Unglue.it is one such platform. By using a crowdfunding platform and the public radio model, Unglue.it is on a mission to take published books and make them legal to be used, distributed, archived and preserved by libraries though Creative Commons licenses.
How it works: Unglue.it decides fair license compensation for rights holders, fundraises that amount through individuals and institutions (kickstarter style), and once the funds are raised, pays the rights holder who then issues an “unglued” or free digital edition for our usage pleasure.
E-books, according to Unglue.it, are expensive to create but cheap to distribute. By covering their fixed costs and reasonable profit up front, authors, publishers, readers and libraries will find a platform like theirs appealing.
They have raised funding for their first unglued book, Oral Literature in Africa, and currently have four active campaigns, which Eric Hellman, president of parent company Gluejar says his team are working very hard to make succeed.
If you’re a book lover and media sharing advocate, make sure to check out Unglue.it and help give “e-books to the world”.
