I haven’t talked about Creative Commons in a while. Last night I went to the London CC Salon, which turned out to be a sort of pep rally for free culture – not a bad thing.

One of the films shown is embedded below (or watch it on YouTube) and makes for a pretty funky introduction to the concepts behind CC. The video is one of the many pieces of CC-licensed work included on Free Me, a DVD created to show off and promulgate the CC ethos. Eventually, it is intended to be sent to journalists and MPs to try to get them to think differently about copyright law.

There hasn’t been much CC-licensed activity in publishing yet, with the notable exceptions of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and novels from experimentalists like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow. The latter two tell some interesting stories about the possibilities of CC.

Stross’ novel Accelerando was released simultaneously in bookstores and as a free, CC-licensed download from the web. According to him and his publisher, this didn’t harm sales one iota – in fact, they’re pretty sure it increased them, not only because of the attendant publicity but because people who downloaded the book and liked it went out and bought the book from shops. Score one to CC.

Doctorow’s Overclocked, downloadable from his site, goes even further. Whereas Accelerando‘s Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license allows sharing in the original form but nothing more, Overclocked‘s Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license means fans can do what the hell they like with the text – including turning it into a song, creating new methods of distribution, or translating it into their local language.

I think the last one is particularly significant, for authors and publishers. Translation of all but the most mainstream books into all but the most widely-spoken languages is often prohibitively expensive – and in many parts of the world, the author never sees any money for it anyway. CC even provides a developing nations license (now merged with the general licenses) to give different rights according to geographical location. As Tim O’Reilly put it: “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”

One really interesting use of these licenses – and I don’t know how this would be done, but I’m sure it’s possible – would be for authors to assign CC licenses to their work when they die, so that the rights to the work would pass directly into the public domain, instead of to the current, bad and corrupt system of author estates** which are allowed to leech off this work for 75 years. Such a move would instantly free up huge chunks of our literary heritage for redistribution and rediscovery.

In fact, there might be a case here for campaigning for existing estates to use CC licenses now. The Society of Authors – who use the income from a number of literary estates, including those of Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, to finance their work – might be a good place to start…

There’s something here too about historical parallels with (or reversals of) physical enclosure and the tragedy of the commons. However, that will have to wait: today is the first day of London Lit Plus, and I expect to see you all there.

** No, they’re not all like that. But plenty are…

Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be no half-measures in crowd-sourcing: you either let people do exactly what they want, or they won’t do it. This was demanded by the users, and the original editorial board had no choice to go along with it. In the end, they realised that this did energise the project.

However, freeing up the community also meant that the final book was not acceptable on delivery: “To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.” This is not that unexpected, but it is a problem – particularly if that editor has to negotiate edits with X hundred authors…

There are some other insights as well – not least that the originally intended participants, tenured professors at Wharton and MIT, refused to participate, and that this didn’t make any difference in the long run – that make the Gilbane report worth reading in full. But it’s interesting to compare too with the Million Penguins project, as the final reports on that make pretty much the same observation: the journey was more interesting than the destination. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a business book or a novel; for the participants, the act of creation is more important than the end result.

Is this, then, the central quality of the wikibook? Crowdwriting – or many-to-many publishing, as Gilbane puts it – is inherently selfish. It’s not in the individual author’s best interest to make their shard integrate well with others – in fact, the opposite may be true. Altruism exists, but it’s balanced with self-promotion, of one kind or another. But perhaps we should pick apart that phrase, ‘many-to-many publishing’ – something there resists the urge to put an end to the endeavour. Like Wikipedia, is a wikibook – by its very nature – permanently unfinished? One of the core perceived attributes of book 1.0 is that it represents the “one true version” – yet many of our most culturally important books – think of the Bible, or the works of Shakespeare – exist in multiple versions.

Perhaps, if we are to understand the wikibook, we need to place it in the context of mythical texts, like the Bible and other religious and historical works. They share the same core attributes: multiple authors, disputed authorship, multiple versions, endless potential versions, authors and versions distributed across time and space and filterable by the reader/editor’s prejudices. The only thing we can do is add metadata to aid historians, tracking changes and creating concordances.

With the need for a “one true version” removed, we promote the reader to editor, and the relationship graph becomes truly many-to-many, instead of passing through the editorial bottleneck. Combine this with innovative licensing which allows for-profit publication of remixed text (CC3.0 now available), and you have the seeds of a new literary culture…

As well as quoting Laurence Sterne, always a good sign, he notes that Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (which we like almost as much as Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life) has been available for free online for years, but the print edition still sells well too. Giving away content for free is the great taboo of the publishing world (see Google Book Search &c.), but for those who’ve actually done it (Charles Stross’ Hugo-nominated Accelerando is a good example), it seems to give a boost.

The most important point from Wark’s interview, however, seems to be that it is not only technology which will take us to the next level. As well as the tools, we need “new cultural, social, and literary conventions. We need to relearn how to read and write.”