AS-IS: Ecommerce, Internet, Software & Technology Law and Contracts

Marketing guru Seth Godin, author of The Bootstrapper's Bible: How to Start and Build a Business With a Great Idea and (Almost) No Money and many others about marketing and blogging, published an ebook titled Everyone's an Expert (About Something): The Search for Meaning Online.

The title page of the ebook says that "Copyright holder is licensing this under the Creative Commons license, Attribution 2.5.  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/".  According to Creative Commons,  that license "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution." 

Fine, right?

Yes, until an email from Amazon.com announced that an unknown publisher was offering his ebook for sale as a new book.  Those two words in the license, "even commercially," meant that Godin had granted the rights to anyone to resell the book, as long as he received attribution as the author.

In a recent posting on his blog (Please Don't Buy This Book), he says "I fully realize that the Creative Commons license I chose permits someone to sell the ebook or even turn it into a book. I had no problem with that. My concern was that the book was being passed off as something new. That my trademark (and your expectations) were violated when Amazon sent out an email indicating that in 2007 I had a new book come out on this topic. The news is that the publisher of the book was incredibly responsive and has changed the cover.  He's being really clear about the origin of the book now, and that was my point all along."  Plus Godin received some good publicity, including a brief mention in The New York Times.

The takeaway: Others won't be so fortunate.  It pays to read and understand the licenses that you grant, even if they are short or look "standard".

By the way, Godin is still making the ebook available for download for free.

Posted by Harry at 11:35 AM | Permalink

Black Duck Software, a provider of open source compliance software, has just closed a new round of financing, according to TheDeal.com.  Black Duck's products are used to locate open source code used in a company's software.

Douglas Levin, president and CEO of Black Duck, said in the article, "We have crossed the point at which companies are reluctant to use open source." 

The article says that Black Duck has seen particularly fast growth -- 849% growth in the number of customer accounts in 2006 -- thanks to merger activity, with its potential to expose an acquirer's liabilities from the target's use of open-source code.

Palamida is another player in the open source compliance software arena.

Posted by Harry at 02:49 PM | Permalink

Knowledge@Wharton has an interesting perspective on new softwawre business models, in Why Software Business Models of the Future Probably Won't Come in a Box.

Kartik Hosanagar, an operations and information management professor at Wharton, believes that "a hybrid business model -- consisting of parts of traditional licensing, on-demand, ad supported and even open source" will emerge and be the "winning model of the future". 

My take: I generally agree.  I supported multiple hybrid Software-Internet business models when I worked at Intuit.  But this transition won't be easy.  Just as Google Adsense, Craig's List free classifieds, and the general move to performance-based marketing on the internet have confounded the newspaper industry, there are going to be wrenching changes ahead for business people who can't broaden their perspective. 

And, that doesn't even begin to raise the equally significant mindset change needed to cope with mobility (an all-the-time, everywhere wireless mobile environment).

Posted by Harry at 01:56 PM | Permalink

Welcome to the AS-IS blog, where I plan to discuss ecommerce, internet, software and technology contracts and licenses, as well as the laws affecting internet and software companies, both large and small.  My focus is on California law and Silicon Valley.

 This blog is sponsored by the Boadwee Law Office.  Please visit that site to learn more about me (attorney Harry Boadwee).

Posted by Harry at 10:53 PM | Permalink