On a couple of occasions, people have expressed hesitancy to post content on Prodigem as the only licensing option made available is the Creative Commons. Sure, we may all love the Creative Commons and I might even be blogging right now in my creative commie t-shirt, but sometimes it just doesn't fit (the license, not the t-shirt). It could be that the content can't necessarily be cleared for Creative Commons, or it could be that they're not quite ready to make the leap, but it is apparent that I need to make some alternatives available.

So, I'd like to float the idea of what I'm calling Copyright Plus Prodigem for specific use on my site. The basic premise is that you declare your content as still under Copyright, but you make a licensing allowance specifically to Prodigem and its users such that they can redistribute your work only through the bit torrent session that you make available. In effect this allows you to go the extra step of letting people redistribute while realizing the wonders of peer-to-peer, but without giving up the control you might not be willing to give (eg. with the creative commons, you can't control where and how people redistribute your work). From my perspective, this might be the exact kind of thing you might be looking for if you wanted to sell your content through Prodigem :).

And to that end, I've been in a few discussions with the Creative Commons people about the possibilities and feasibility of something like a "Delayed" Creative Commons license. The idea here would be that you'd setup a date in the future where your work would automatically transition to a Creative Commons license. So, for example, you could initially use something like Copyright Plus Prodigem allowing you to possibly derive income from the content, and then after a year (or 5 years, or 10 years) the work automatically transitions to a Creative Commons license of your choosing enabling the general public to do with it what they may. The possibilities abound.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:21 PM in prodigem | Comments (0)