Why does BLOOM offer the option to contact the copyright holder for any permissions? It seems contrary to the spirit of CC. Perhaps I don’t really understand the concept? Can you enlighten me?
I see books in the BLOOM library that have confusing copyright status.
I’m looking at one currently that is labeled
Copyright © 2007, SIL Cameroon
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
You may not use this work for commercial purposes. You may adapt and add to this work. You must keep the copyright and credits for authors, ILLUSTRATORS, etc.
I just wanted to use one of the images from the book, but when I looked at the copyright on that page it says to contact the copyright holder for any permissions. This seemed contradictory to me.
I think I just won’t use this image, but it raised the question in my mind.
Hoping for clarification.
I’m no expert on copyright law. But for what it’s worth, if you can’t do anything with a book without permission from the copyright owner, that’s not a CC license. Bloom does not force people to use CC licenses, we just encourage it. In fact, by default Bloom Library filters out books that don’t have CC licenses, because they are so much more difficult to reuse. The no-derivatives CC license is also rather problematic, because it does not allow translations of the work, which is one of the main purposes of the library; but the decision is up to the copyright owner. We want to help people create literacy materials, even if they choose not to share.
It is possible that images used in a book have a different copyright owner and license than the book itself. It’s a rather confusing situation if the image has a less permissive license than the book as a whole, since people tend to assume that the license at the start of the book applies to everything in it; but unfortunately, the author of a book may not own the most suitable images to put in it, and may not have the right to license them the way she wants to license the book. All Bloom can do is allow the situation to be documented as clearly as we can manage. Hence the ability to store copyright and license information for each image as well as the book.
Hope this helps some.