Although Bloom does not require Creative Commons Licenses, their use greatly smooths out the whole free book ecosystem. But they aren’t perfect, and a common problem people run into is that they want to say that they don’t want people substantially changing the text. They may also not want changes to the images. That’s fine, they can use CC-BY-ND, or “no derivaties”.
The problem comes when they do want people to translate the book into other languages. A translation is a derivative, so when we say “no derivatives” that’s overly restrictive.
Today, we recommend that people in this situation just add a note below the license
However, I’m wondering if we should formalize this a bit and have Bloom provide an option, as though Creative Commons did have the option we need.
The license chooser could be expanded like this:
Pros:
- Standardizes how to express this somewhat common need. Click one box and you get a badge that is easy to understand, text on the Credits page that may come in multiple languages, etc.
Cons:
- This isn’t actually an official license. It’s still BY-ND or BY-NC-ND or whatever, but with a addon sentence allowing translation.
- increased complexity, as there is another option to read ad understand.
- I’m not clear if this allows publishers to fully control changes of images, sound, and video.
I would appreciate community feedback on this idea.
– John