I, for one, wouldn’t want to publish free work and gain a dime. It seems past my morals, even if the information is free to do with what you please. I think the best scenario would be a published Wikipedia where all profits went to charities and Wikipedia itself.

Utopian, right?

This is useful. It’s allowed by the license. If you didn’t want your writing to be freely redistributed, why did you put it somewhere where those were the terms? If you think they’re making too much profit, figure out how to undercut them. If you really think there’s something unseemly about what Bertelsmann is doing, you don’t get what the creative commons is about.

Yes, it does seem a bit “unseemly,” but there are a number of assumptions in your editorial that may need deeper examining.

For example, your comment on Bertelsmann keeping most of the profit? How much would that actually be, after all other non-content costs are subtracted (printing, for example)? Five percent to the collective might not be out of wack when compared to other costs.

Another assumption is that people will actually buy the paper copy. I think it will be an excellent social experiment to see if people do, and ultimately, why they would buy a paper copy.

I hope you will be able to track this story as it progresses.

Thanks again,

AJ Hyman, Toronto

“The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document “free” in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.”
source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Open Source and Free Software (GPL,…) and Copyleft contents doesn’t forbid commercial use, in the contrary it encourages it (If it wasn’t the case magazines for example couldn’t redistribute Free Software). The economical models around Free Software/ Copyleft contents are not based on the content themselves (which are always Free) but on eventual services for them (IBM, HP…). So Bertelsmann won’t really sell content as such, it will just sell a *service* (a book, written on paper, more comfortable than a computer screen and can be used without a computer everywhere) and people can freely decide to buy this *service* or not if they find any need for it.

“”" It can then monetize that content, keep most of the profits (a publisher’s dream) “”"

Copyleft content is not a publisher’s dream, there’s a very important difference, it’s called competition.

In the real publisher world the publisher (generally) have the monopole of the price of the book for 90 years. There is no possible competition because the publisher generally owns the publishing rights.
That’s why non-public domain books are so expansive, there’s no competition possible on price: you take it or you leave it.

In the case of the Wikipedia (a copyleft licence), *any* publisher or association or individual or church or (put your name here) can publish a better price/service if he wants. So making a huge/unfair profit is just impossible because competition levels the playground.

So I certainly think we can reproach a lot of things to the Wikimedia foundation (and the Wikipedia itself) but not to live by its standard and copyleft license which is there since the beginning.

So for my part I’m pleased Bertelsmann is publishing this book and I hope there will be many other publishers/associations going for it to lower the price and give access to real books based on Wikipedia to a maximum of people.

francois

PS: thanks for OpenCulture (great site that I really appreciate)