Google Books Introduces Creative Commons Licenses

Google may be getting portrayed as the bad guy by some regarding its Google Books project with fears and even accusations of monopoly and other negative comments, but it is trying to be as open as possible, be it because of the undergoing DOJ investigation or out of genuine good intentions. In any case, it's taking another step with the announcement of new tools and options for authors who choose to distribute their works under a Creative Commons license.

“Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There's even an option to dedicate your book to the public domain,” Xian Ke, associate product manager, Google Books, wrote. “We've marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book's left hand navigation bar.”

Creative Commons licenses offer authors a way of allowing others to distribute, share and modify their work. The six CC version 3 licenses offer varying degrees of freedom to others but the authors still retain the copyright. However, there is the option to release a work while waiving all copyrights, to the extent of the law, with the CC0 license. Google now supports all CC licenses plus the “Public Domain” license, which is meant for works that have passed their copyright protection period.

Rights holders will now be able to specify any of the open licenses for their works on Google Books. If they are already part of Google's Partner program the new options are now available in the account settings; otherwise they can sign up for a Partner account and go on from there. The books that are released under a CC license are now clearly marked so that users will know if they can share or even modify the works. In the future Google plans to introduce CC license filters in the advanced search like it recently did for its Image Search.