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by j_baker 5859 days ago
Although your point is reasonable, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges. If someone uses my code, they won't be making money off of it directly (if they did, I'd be highly surprised). If someone publishes and sells an article that I wrote, that is making money off of my work directly.

If you genuinely prefer a less-restrictive license, more power to you. But the argument that people should license their work under a CC license to make things easier for publishers is a bit like my boss saying "Why don't you just work for free so I don't have to go through the hassle of having to pay you?"
2 comments
paulgb 5859 days ago
Four or five years ago I was contacted by a company that wanted to redistribute a program I wrote in a for-profit CD-ROM compilation. I think that's a more direct analogy to the magazine situation. I happily agreed. I get the emotional difference between giving something away for free for personal use and giving something away for someone else's profit, but is there any logical justification of the distinction?

Now I license my content as CC-BY-SA. Recently a for-profit blog took some graphs from a post I wrote and added context in German. This was totally within the lines of the license, and I thought it was pretty cool that people in Germany were now able to benefit from my work.

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mbrubeck 5859 days ago
"Why don't you just work for free..?"

But the contributors like pg are already creating and publishing these articles for free. Most of them benefit only indirectly from their writing, and that benefit is increased, not decreased, when the writing is distributed to more readers.

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j_baker 5859 days ago
Maybe I gave the wrong impression. Does somebody want to use a blog post in a magazine that probably won't pay much in royalties anyway? I'd probably let them use it for free. Does say Newsweek want to use it? You bet your ass they'd better pay me for it.

I suppose it's less about wanting to get paid for my work as much as it is wanting to be able to control whether or not I get paid for my work. If I think that somebody has a valid reason to use my blog posts, then I might let them. But I do want them to get my permission first. Maybe some people are comfortable with giving anyone and everyone the ability to use their writings in whatever commercial environment they want to. I personally am not.

...but regardless "It'll make the publishers' lives easier!" isn't a very convincing argument to me. :-)

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