Was This the First CC Community-Edited Novel?

Odinson writes "In late 2005 I released a draft of a science fiction novel under the by-nc-nd CC license. I started accepting edits in the hope of polishing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. A publisher never materialized, but after thousands of comments the draft started getting really solid. So a couple of months ago I decided to buy an ISBN and sell hard copies from Lulu. While doing research for a press release, I was unable to uncover the first community-edited, CC-licensed work of fiction. I strongly suspect that my novel is the first. Can anybody point to a prior example? How about under other licenses? If someone has traveled this road before, I'd like to ask them how it went. I would also like to vet this question here before staking a claim to be the first."

Comments

by-nc-nd? Community edited?

[WK2]

How can a community edited work be published under by-nc-ND? The nd means "no derivative" which means that the public can't distribute modified works. When he says, "community edited" does he mean a private community? Also, according the the website, they are selling this book, which you can't do if it is by-NC-nd, where the NC means non-commercial. If it was community edited, you would need permission from every copyright holder (which might mean a lot) if you want a different license.

With so many things left unanswered, how can we answer this guy's question?

Re:by-nc-nd? Community edited?

[Martigens]

Then it sounds to me like the community edits were copy-edits, rather a replacement for the kind of work a professional fiction editor would do. Even if the comments went into detail about plot holes etc, it sounds a bit more like a workshop-type interaction where participants critique the author's work (except that usually it's also vice versa).

You're probably aware that there are several long-running writing workshops dedicated to SF/F. These are 'communities' who provide 'edits' of the sort you describe. Have none of the resulting novels ever been released under a CC license? Did no CC-releasing author ever workshop their book in some kind of a community?

Maybe the oldest one

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the oldest Community Edited work of fiction is the Bible...not sure that it is CC licenced though.

First community driven book?

[stpk4]

Wouldn't that be the Bible? = )

Re:Cheap publicity.

[makkverk]

This novel was originally posted online as a rough draft in late 2005. It has made great strides, receiving tens of thousands of reader contributions. It has received good reader reviews, and has been downloaded 6000 times in a two year span.

So, do the people that helped you get a cut of the $12.95?

No, but under the CC lisence they're all allowed to print and sell the book themselves.

Folktales

[$0.02]

Folktales, Fairy Tales, Myths, Urban Legends

Re:Cheap publicity.

[sapphire wyvern]

They're allowed to print it, but not sell it. It's the by-nc-nd licence, which means "Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works".

I presume that as the copyright holder, rather than a licensee, he's allowed to also sell copies. The question is whether the "community contributions" hold any copyright as well, and if he is only entitled to them under the CC license terms (like GPL patches without assignation of copyright). If so, he might not be within his rights to sell the book via Lulu!

I did something similar in 2002

[localroger]

This is pretty much how I released MOPI. After putting it online I received hundreds of editing suggestions, many of which I incorporated into the MS. As a result there are only a couple of typos in the printed version, which I'm leaving in because I'd have to get a new ISBN to fix them.

I didn't use a CC license though the one I drafted for myself is pretty similar. In particular I insisted on reserving print rights for myself. CC seems a bit more intent on making information free than reserving the possibility of future conventional publication.

Also: Oxford English Dictionary

[Hemogoblin]

The Oxford English Dictionary, which was first conceived in the 1850's, was a completely volunteer driven project. It's like the Wikipedia of today, except by mail and 140 years earlier. I read an awesome book about the making of the dictionary, but the title escapes me. I'll quote Wikipedia instead.

Volunteer readers would copy to quotation slips passages illustrating actual word usages, then post them to the dictionary editor. In 1858, the Society agreed to the project in principle, with the title "A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles" ... ... On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published, and research started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54-pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month, the thirty-one-year old Coleridge died of tuberculosis. Apparently the hardest part of the work was finding quotations of some of the simplest words, since everyone was interested in quoting long and complicated words.

Re:Also: Oxford English Dictionary

[the phantom]

The creation of the OED was certainly in interesting effort, but I would not go so far as to say it is like the Wikipedia of its time. The OED was edited an compiled by a very small group of people, who had complete editorial control. Certainly, volunteers submitted words and quotes to the editors, but the editors were ultimately in control over which words and quotes ended up in the dictionary. This is in stark contrast to Wikipedia, where there really isn't any centralized control.

Re:Cheap publicity.

[Josh Triplett]

I presume that as the copyright holder, rather than a licensee, he's allowed to also sell copies. The question is whether the "community contributions" hold any copyright as well, and if he is only entitled to them under the CC license terms (like GPL patches without assignation of copyright). If so, he might not be within his rights to sell the book via Lulu! Unless the author established some additional terms on top of the CC-by-nc-nd license, any "community contributions" represent unauthorized derivative works.

If the author had instead used CC-by-nc-sa, the "community contributions" would fall under the same license, which would give him no right to sell the book with the contributions included.

So either way, the author has no right to sell copies of the edited book, via Lulu or otherwise.

Yay for unintended consequences. People should think twice before using a Creative Commons license that includes "nc" or "nd" terms. In addition to making the work non-free, they can lead to consequences like these.

Re:Cheap publicity.

[Odinson]

My cut is $3.30 if it's sold from Lulu, and $.48 cents for books sold from Barnes and Noble. After three two four years of writing, editing, and a month of working the Kinks out of Lulu, I have sold exactly 23 books. Half of those I bought, and mailed to the heavy editors to say thanks. Reviews have been great, so all I can think is people just don't take CC/Lulu authors seriously. Not a good sign for those west coast haters out there.

Since you can download it for free, best I can figure is I really just did this for the Slashdot Karma. :)

Re:Not the first book

[benwiggy]

No, we both have the same definition of worthwhile.

I'm not talking about the worth of the religious sentiment of the book itself.

I suggest that particular translation is worthy for its literary merit and cultural impact, irrespective of the Judao-Christian message.

I suspect that you don't find the book itself annoying - nor good for a laugh - but rather that you might find some people's attitudes and beliefs so, which they claim to have taken from the pages of a bible - not necessarily this one.

Re:Cheap publicity.

[fyoder]

Slashdot pays in "goods and services".....it's a barter system. In return for contributing to the community, they provide a place for you to contribute and poorly editted summaries on which to comment (since no one really reads the articles, the comments *MUST* be about the summaries). Reminds me of the old internet ethic, 'If you take from the internet, give back to the internet.' Then AOL let their users online and it became 'If you pay AOL, everyone on the internet owes you everything for free.' I liked the first version better.

Devilbunnies (1993)

[Remus Shepherd]

Let me introduce you to alt.Devilbunnies , founded in 1993.

It started as a Usenet newsgroup devoted to nonsense. But sometime around 1993, people began generating a consistent storyline within the newsgroup. (The particulars involved intelligent, man-eating rabbits and their quest to enslave humanity, but that's not important for this discussion.) Before very long, the writers in alt.devilbunnies were creating novel-length stories, often with over a dozen contributors, and all set within an internally consistent shared world.

The Devilbunnies phenomenon continued from around 1993 to around 2002, when the authors slowly abandoned the newsgroup. There were multiple attempts to bring the Devilbunnies to the web, or to publish their shared stories. But every time someone began such a project, someone in the community would oppose it for one reason or another. Because the copyright on the devilbunny universe was shared between everyone involved, there was no way of publishing or continuing it if even a single person vetoed the project. So those who wanted to make it bigger eventually gave up. Now the devilbunnies are nothing more than a group of friends who fondly remember stories they wrote together but which will never -- *can* never -- live again in any other format.

I believe alt.Devilbunnies is the first internet-powered collaborative story group. (There are many pre-internet efforts, going all the way to Beowulf and beyond, as others have mentioned.)

It is also my considered opinion that the fate of Devilbunnies awaits any collaborative story project, unless it is a small, close-knit group who have been told in advance that the project is intended for publication and been given clear rules for how it will be done. Copyright laws are strict enough, and legal expenses great enough, that a single bad egg can ruin an entire collaborative fiction project. So be careful, and don't let what happened to alt.Devilbunnies happen to you.

Or in other words, keep an eye on your toes, because those wabbits will eat them if you give them half a chance. And keep your fireaxe handy.

Re:Devilbunnies (1993)

[Brother Phil]

Reminds me of when Thomas Covenant visited the world of r.h.o.d, and also of "Flowers for Thagernon" - a colaboratively produced pastiche so well written that I was laughing at the puns and distortions as I wept for the protagonist.

Re:Cheap publicity.

[Em Adespoton]

This is exactly the point. Publishing is not being crowdsourced; editing is. The resulting work is publicly available for ANYONE to take and print under their own ISBN; in this case, it is the person who originated the project who decided to monetize it through publication. Hopefully he'll roll the profits back into the site to help foster future such projects -- but that's his choice. He could just as easily pocket the profits. If he does this, the rest of his team is within their rights to fork the project and produce their own in-print copy (with edits if desired).