Interesting dust-up brewing this morning. In one corner is Seth Godin. In the other? “BNPublishing.” (Whoever they are.)
Apparently, BNPublishing has taken Seth’s free Everyone’s An Expert e-Book, repackaged it, and is now selling it through Amazon, eBay, and one would presume other outlets. A quick dig this morning on the BNPublishing website seems to show their business model as taking non-rights-protected works and packaging them up for easy sale. For example, they are also selling titles such as The Art of War and the like on their site.
The issue: Everyone’s An Expert was released under a CreativeCommons-Attribution-2.5 license, which allows commercial usage.
(There is another license, CreativeCommons-Attribution-NonCommercial-2.5, that precludes commercial usage. But that’s not the license that was used.)
Any experts out there? Are there other aspects (e.g. trademark) that would prevent this?
Not sure, but I think Seth might be out of luck on this one. YAFLE.
(N.B. Not a lawyer, etc.)
Update: MindBlogging has a similar take.