The capabilities of the 'Creative Commons' licence are a threat to readers

This brings us to the second relationship, which is not with a publisher, but with the laws we share.

I can't set the type for my own print run and offer that printing for sale. I can't reprint the book under my own name. If I want to reproduce large slabs of copy for some reason, I need permission.

If I break the law, there might be an individual complainant, but my offence is against the laws of Australia. I am not in breach of a contract with a person or company, but with the law. Law is made by a (flawed) democratic process; and if the citizens of a country wish to change their laws, they can.

A licence is a horse of a completely different colour: it’s a contract; a private agreement between parties. Even a liberal contract – which the Creative Commons undoubtedly is – has the quality not of a law governing citizens’ lives, but of an enduring relationship between two individuals. Under copyright, I can own a thousand books, but I have no contractual relationship with anyone, merely an obligation to obey the law. However, under a licence – even the Creative Commons – a thousand books would mean a thousand relationships. Under copyright, my rights to treat the books as property are identical for every book. But if books are licensed, my rights may no longer be standardised or predictable.

That's not all: because a contract cannot supersede the law, the relationship consisting in the licence exists not instead of the normal obligations of copyright, but in addition to them. Even if the conditions of the licence are more liberal than the copyright regime under which they exist; the conditions of the relationship do not alter the fact of its existence.

To cite the Creative Commons licence: “The work is protected by copyright and/or other applicable law. Any use of the work other than as authorized under this license or copyright law is prohibited.”

If I'm buying a book, I don't want an ongoing contract with, and obligation to, its author. I want the book.

In software, Open Source licensing is essentially a Fabian creature. Software licensing predates the GPL; it was an invention of the software industry to try and achieve greater protection than software could then have enjoyed under copyright law. Open Source is based on a licensing approach because it was necessary to ensure that source code, once published, could not then be misappropriated and obscured; or rather, to give the community of users some protection against someone taking source code from the public domain, privatising it, and then trying to impose their ownership on the predecessor product.

But with the application to books of a seemingly benign software-like licence, the Creative Commons has a collateral effect which is evil: it conditions the recipient to accept the existence of a licence in addition to the rights they hold in copyright law. In other words, the Creative Commons licence lets me do more with a book; but paradoxically it does so by diminishing my abstract rights. If I want to read a book published under the Creative Commons, I must accept the licence and obey the law. A new condition is added to my right to read.

In the computer industry, the term “social engineering” describes an act of trickery which yields access to privileged information – such as phoning someone, claiming to be a help desk operator, and asking for their password or account details. There is another way to look at the idea of social engineering: where people with good intentions condition a set of responses which is then easily exploited by the malicious. “Click Yes to Continue” wasn't invented by scam-artists or Internet fraudsters; but once users are accustomed to a certain response, a dialogue box saying “Click Yes to Continue” is easily exploited to advance evil purposes.

In the case of the Creative Commons, the social engineering is accomplished by a very liberal licence. It conditions people to accept the fact of licensing, even though it represents a new, contractual relationship which makes me a smaller man under the law.

Once one set of licence terms is acceptable in the purchase of a book, any other set can be substituted in its place; because many, if not most, citizens lack the time or specialist knowledge required to discriminate between the minutiae of different licences. Well, I don't want my books under licence. If I buy a book, I want it to be property.