Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

The primary (not residual) value of a Creative Commons license to 
the producer, not the user, of a work is in the branding and 
related linking from the CC-marked content to other content or 
services for which other economic value may be derived.  Think of 
CC content as product sampling or a form of embedded advertising. 
A good analogy is with product placements in television and 
movies.  The hero beats up the bad guys, runs off with the girl, 
and then pauses to light up a Marlboro.  The image of Marlboro in 
the medium is placed through a financial arrangement with 
Marlboro's producers. I have discussed this matter in a blog post 
on open content called "The Trouble with Free" 
(http://pubfrontier.com/2008/06/08/the-trouble-with-free/).

For most academic information released under a CC license, the 
aim is not to market consumer products but other forms of 
information services and (the principal reason, at least at this 
time) the reputation of the CC content's sponsor, typically an 
author.  Not from its conceptual basis but from its actual 
implementations by producers, CC content is thus an aspect of 
brand management.

The value to users is another matter entirely, but not what Sandy 
was asking about.  Users can derive enormous benefits from CC 
content.  This is because as an aspect of brand management, some 
producers release very good content indeed.  Some of the 
information sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, for instance, 
is well-researched, carefully written, and balanced in its 
presentation.  Brand management is not necessarily a pollutant. 
We simply have to view all ostensibly free content with an 
appropriate degree of skepticism.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: MPS and PLoS Sign Agreement

> Just curious, what exactly is the value of the copyright that 
> the author retains under this CC license since users can do 
> practically everything with it except remove the author's name? 
> There is no residual commercial value here, is there? Under 
> European copyright law, with its moral rights" provisions, 
> "attribution" already is a moral right ensured by law, so there 
> would be no need even for this kind of CC license, would there? 
> One could simply grant to users free use of the article for any 
> purpose with no need to protect attribution, since that right 
> is inalienable in "moral rights" systems.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>>PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to 
>>all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain 
>>ownership of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone 
>>to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy 
>>articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and 
>>source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or 
>>the publishers. Thus, the contents of the seven Open Access 
>>journals of PLoS are freely accessible for the reader worldwide 
>>via internet.