A Free Culture Acorn Sprouts

I keep half an eye on references to this site by using feeds from Google News and Blog Search to catch links to here or mentions of the site (or me).

A lot of times the feeds turn up some crummy splog scraping my content. A lot of people get up in arms about this, but so far with the sites I've seen, I really don't care. Whether they properly attribute the work or link or not; big deal. They've just been no-name sites. If some really popular site used my work without attribution (or with misattribution), that might bother me more. We'll see if and when it happens.

I'm just not a fan of copyright or the idea that people can own published digital bits. My use of a Creative Commons license here is more to show people who care about doing the right thing that they are free to use the work. In my humble and considered opinion, proper attribution is the primary moral responsibility we have when copying and reusing work.

I also find real blogs talking about or pointing to movingtofreedom.org that I might not have noticed through other channels. That's always appreciated, and thank you to those who have kindly shown some light into this murky corner of the Net.

Other Scott Carpenters

With my name search feed, I get lots of results for:

• The astronaut.
• Some basketball coach in Granville, Ohio.
• Some guy who works for the state department.
• Some artist who does contemporary erotic book covers.

This Scott Carpenter

A couple of days ago I found something a little bit different:

A post by "unknown" is sometimes a hint at a sploggish kind of site, although not necessarily. But what's this about something published in 2006? Picnic! I'm sure you're all familiar with my big free culture publication event last year. I had cast my oft-rejected tale out in to the void for your amusement, hoping to achieve something in the new media that I had failed at in traditional routes. Had I garnered some circulation?

manybooks.net

I followed the link back to manybooks.net, a site run by Matthew McClintock. He provides free eBooks/etexts for download in a number of formats. These are free as in free speech and free culture. It is a nice, professional looking site that has been around for a while and currently offers over 16,000 free eBooks.

Many of the books are older public domain works taken from Project Gutenberg (which encourages reuse and links to manybooks.net as an example of a redistributor). Others are more recent works available under a Creative Commons license.

I'm flattered to have my science fiction short story included in the collection. I don't want to read too much in to the editorial validation and acclaim that goes along with Matt's decision to add my story, but apparently he thought it was good enough to spend time picking it up, categorizing it, and plugging it in to the site. The landing page for "Picnic" is well-presented and an excerpt is displayed. There are over a dozen formats available for download and it can be read online.

New titles are available as an RSS feed. There have been 38 downloads so far. (Here's where all of you fanatically loyal movingtofreedom.org readers should go download my story. Maybe I'll get in to some popular category and skyrocket to authorial fame.)

I appreciate the conscientious approach. There is a hyperlink to my post with the story, and at the end of the story is a text link spelled out with the Creative Commons license. Gary Mitchell is credited with artwork, but the illustrations didn't make it in to the manybooks.net version. I suppose it would be a whole nother layer of overhead to manage images also.

Thoughts on the free culture thing

This is awesome! Matt is able to pick up new Creative Commons works without having to run around getting clearance, which is how it should be. I love that older public domain books and newer works can be collected and offered so conveniently. The proliferation of online libraries is a good thing for sharing and preserving knowledge and culture.

As an unpublished and unknown writer, it's a nice ego boost to get some added exposure for my work. I put "Picnic" out there and now it's taken hold in some new soil. Maybe it will go nowhere; maybe Matt will realize he made a terrible mistake and take it down. Or maybe it will live a long time, bouncing around from site to site over the centuries, and I'll have achieved some measure of literary immortality.

All on account of my silly little story. :-)

Related: Science Fiction Short Story: "Picnic"