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So, you got your Instructable all posted and sent it to all your friends, and somebody comes back with, "Hey, I want to print a PDF but it says I have to pay."
"Hmm," you say, "I thought I specified Non-Commercial in my Creative Commons License. Let me check on that."
And so the journey begins.
Log out of Instructables and find your own Instructable. Click on the "more info" link.
"Hmm," you say, "I thought I specified Non-Commercial in my Creative Commons License. Let me check on that."
And so the journey begins.
Log out of Instructables and find your own Instructable. Click on the "more info" link.
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Your friend must be crazy ... Instructables doesn't violate the Creative Commons licensing. There's not even mention in their Terms of Service [yet as of 2009-Aug-17] about a separate license between you and Instructables so they can charge for your work.
So while you're logged-out (as if you're an anonymous Interweb lurker), click on that PDF link.
What's this? I need to have a "Pro" membership to download PDF's? Okay ... and it's a modest (but not Non-Commercial) expense. Hmm ...
Update 2009-Aug-19: I should have read closer. In 7(d) it says, "you grant Instructables the world-wide, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, publicly perform and publicly display such Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting Instructables." It's the "royalty-free" thing that implies they can collect money but they're under no obligation to pay you part of it.
So while you're logged-out (as if you're an anonymous Interweb lurker), click on that PDF link.
What's this? I need to have a "Pro" membership to download PDF's? Okay ... and it's a modest (but not Non-Commercial) expense. Hmm ...
Update 2009-Aug-19: I should have read closer. In 7(d) it says, "you grant Instructables the world-wide, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, publicly perform and publicly display such Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting Instructables." It's the "royalty-free" thing that implies they can collect money but they're under no obligation to pay you part of it.
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The deeper issue here is that we provide a valuable service in our documentation engine and the community we've built and managed, and need to make money for Instructables to be a sustainable service. Advertising only does a fraction, so we've created Pro accounts as a way to charge the audience a fair price for the value they receive. PDFs are an added-value, and are a big part of why members opt to go pro. So, while it's your choice to post a PDF copy of your project within the Instructable, I hope you'll consider what it would mean if this were to happen on a large scale, and what that would mean for the future existence of Instructables.
In any case, many of these issues have been discussed at length here, here, and here.
Finally, you do make a good point that we don't specifically attach your chosen license to the PDF itself. Considering these PDFs are traded around and potentially posted elsewhere, we should make sure the license is included.
Ok, now to the hopefully reasonably-concise point-by-point:
Re; licensing. I guess my view of Creative Commons is a little different (perhaps from the perspective of authorship rather than licensee). As far as I know, a CC license applies to anyone who wishes to use a work unless another license is in place that supersedes it. As such, Instructables must abide by the CC license except that there is another license in the Terms of Service that I agreed to. 7(d) just notes "royalty-free use": my bad. Not being a lawyer nor an avid reader of legalese, I didn't consider that implied that Instructables may profit from my work without an expectation of payment to me.
Re: documentation engine. The documentation engine is indeed fantastic and obviously a challenge. Manually laying out good instructions is hard. Doing it automatically with good results ... dude. You blew my mind. I fully understand your desire to recoup your expenses in creating and running it. I hope, however, that you also understand us authors' desires to recoup our expenses in writing Instructables. By that, I mean that Instructables is valuable partly for its engineering and your efforts, and is valuable partly for the authored content.
So the value provided by the website, hosting, design, engineering is some percentage X of the total value, and the value of all the Instructables authoring is the remainder 1-X. Each individual Instructable contributes some fraction of that 1-X.
Now I speculate, because I agreed in Terms of Use to not expect royalty payments. What if the first Instructable whose Pro features are used after a user signs up for Pro gets a 1-cent credit towards Pro membership? In other words, if a user sees an Instructable they like, signs up, and downloads the PDF, the author of that first-used Instructable gets a penny toward Pro. This would help people understand how minor their individual contribution is toward Instructables as a whole, and acquiesce a true "profit sharing" kind of thing. Effectively, this means "X" is 2.94/2.95, "1-X" is 0.01/2.95, and the function to divine an individual Instructable's value is simply that an Instructable that inspires Pro purchases is monetarily valuable. Obviously that penny could be 1% or 0.5%, or whatever.
Re: PDF licenses. Thanks. That would be excellent and helpful. I believe it should be a copyright notice with the author's name, and the CC license per the requirements/suggestion of Creative Commons.
And finally, I tend to gravitate to bizarre methods of communication if possible. As such, the point of this Instructable isn't really to get people to short-circuit the system and get Instructables.com shut down, it's more to raise awareness that all is not as it appears: when you click that selection for a Creative Commons license, it does not apply to Instructables.com for that is already enforced in the Terms of Use.
Thanks for your reasoned response, Eric.
You are free to Remix — to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.
From those parts of the license it certainly leaves a possible interpretation that the PDF is a remix of the Instructable (adaptation from web medium to PDF) which under the Share-alike term cannot be used for commercial purposes, and IANAL but I see where you are coming from in interpreting PDF downloads, which you must be a Pro member to use, as commercial use.
Someone with a better grasp of how these licenses work in practise probably needs to clarify this issue, I just hope that it stays in good faith and isn't used as point-scoring by any anti-pro members. Remember that you can unpublish your Instructable at any time if you feel the site is abusing it, but they don't owe you free PDF downloads any more than they owe you free ice cream.
I'm no lawyer, but I checked the Terms of Service, and Instructables does not appear to claim a separate commercial license for the work, only a lightweight license to retransmit it for purposes of operating the website like most sites do. Since the PDF does not include the CC license (which in itself is a violation of the CC license I specified, should it be enforceable), or any other license for that matter, I boldly assumed the CC license I specified in the Instructable was in force for the PDF, shared it, and gave attribution (in the form of identifying my source).
I have to put a finer point on the "free PDF" angle, though. Because of the licensing I set up when I wrote this (and all my other) Instructables, that if Instructables creates a derivative work (PDF), they must either provide it for free (non-commercial) unless I agree to license my Instructable(s) to them under a separate commercial license. Likewise, they would only owe me free ice cream if they said they'd give me free ice cream.
I believe there are a lot of sites which do this, provide a paid-for service in which they give you access to public domain information, so presumably there is a precedent for a site like Project Gutenberg being allowed to charge for the service they provide of collecting public-domain works and making them available for download.
I guess an alternative angle is that the PDF isn't a derivative work, it is the original work (which is freely available online) delivered via a different medium. It's free to listen to music on the radio, but it's not free to have it on CD, despite it being the same work, because the method of delivery is what incurs the costs, not the content.
It took me a while to understand this, but licensing my copyrighted work through Creative Commons is not the same thing as giving it away. I had to realize that CC licenses are not exclusive: I can make a separate license for a specific party for a specific purpose. Also, the CC licensing is not "transferred" to a derivative work that is also CC licensed, it is included with the derivative work's CC license. I imagine it becomes a convoluted mess if you're 15 derivative works deep, but when it's just 1 or 2 levels, it's not so bad.
So here's what I think Instructables needs to do: they need to make a separate license with each author of an Instructable that gives Instructables the right to collect money in exchange for the delivery of the Instructable in PDF format. Ideally, they could offer an alternative where the author could decline, and the Instructable would be presented for free, just not available as PDF.
And as far as CC is concerned, "commercial" means essentially, "in exchange for money" (in non-legalese ... once again: I am not a lawyer). Consider the case where someone takes one of your Instructables, publishes it in a book, then charges only the publishing costs. This is not allowed under a Non-Commercial license. The legal way is for the potential publisher to contact the author (or, in the case of the -- I still believe -- derivative PDF, contact both Instructables and the original author) and to hash out a license. It could be as simple as, "hey, I want to publish this and only collect the publishing costs, is that okay?", although unless you are trusting or just don't care, a lawyer would be helpful.