AKMA’s Random Thoughts: If I Had One Phone Call

January 27, 2003

If I Had One Phone Call

I’ve been asking around behind the scenes, and people have had some helpful ideas, but so far nothing’ really come around on the legal front—so I’m throwing open the floor for suggestions, nominations, or even volunteers relative to the Disseminary and our copyright/license.

Here are the variables:

We do have some money to pay for legal consulting, but not an unlimited amount
We expect to work with what amounts to a modification on a Creative Commons license, so I’d think this wouldn’t be mind-bendingly complicated
We’d be delighted to share out the resulting license with anyone else who may find her- or himself in our situation

We’d like a license comparable to the Creative Commons “Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License.” The variations we would like on this theme would run this way: The author agrees to open distribution of the work in question, but assigns to the Disseminary project the prerogative to arrnage for a printer to print and sell the work. In other words, we have a print-on-demand publisher ready to join forces with us; if Shelley wrote one of her parables for the Disseminary, we would host it, mark it up, prepare a fine web version and a PDF and quite possibly an audio version. The license would permit us to distribute the parable in digital forms for free, and to arrange with a printer to make commercial copies (in which case, a royalty would go to Shelley). Shelley, in turn, would have the right to publish it in a collection of her essays and photographs, intact or revised--but only Shelley (as author) or the Disseminary (as holder of the licensed original work) would be permitted to make commercial use of the work.

If someone knows a legal professional who can help us set this up, please let Trevor or me know. We’e itching to get started, but we’d like to be able to say we have the legal loose ends tied down nicely.

Posted by AKMA at January 27, 2003 09:57 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I can't really help much here (IANAL), but I will make one suggestion: It's probably better if you don't make think of it as modifications to a CC license. Instead, license to everyone under the terms of a standard CC license and get the author to grant a license to the Disseminary allowing commercial uses, etc.

That way you can keep the license for the public simple, and since it's a standard CC license we won't have yet another license to read through. Also, a license granting non-exclusive commercial rights should be a fairly standard thing that shouldn't take too much work. Making a hybrid license would be more tricky.

Now, the only situation I can think of in which this wouldn't be appropriate would be if the Disseminary wanted to allow other people to make derivative works and wanted the ability to profit from those derivative works. If you go for the No-Derivs licenses, that won't come up. Also if you went for a Derivs license but didn't want to profit from derivatives, it wouldn't come up.

Posted by: colin_zr at January 30, 2003 04:47 AM

This will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of

Posted by: Harman at January 13, 2004 09:43 AM

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.

Posted by: Gerrard at January 13, 2004 09:44 AM

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

Posted by: Emmanuel at January 13, 2004 09:44 AM