Start the viral campaign: Google's PR for new browser distributable under a CC licence
Published by elliott bledsoe on Monday, 1 September 2008 at 11:41 AMI saw this morning the Google Chrome comic this morning and my interest in the Chrome project has peaked. An interesting marketing campaign by Google:
Get Scott McCloud to create a comic book explaining your new project using cartoon characters of your actual project team talking about the project. Stick the comic and the comic only in an envelope and post it to journalists. Done.
What is more, as I read on Mike Linksvayer's blog, that the hardcopy comic was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Generic licence. The licence notification is on the back cover of the comic:
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| The backcover of the Google Chrome comic. CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 Generic. |
Clearly they want recipients to distribute it. Which is exactly what Phillipp Lenssen of Blogoscope did. He scanned each page and put each image together to look at on his site.
Mike took Lenssen's scans and compiled them into a PDF document if anyone is interested in seeing the whole comic as it was issued to journos. And before some of you jump on the 'but that's a derivative work' band wagon, just have a read of what Mike had to say on the issue:
Note that although Creative Commons licenses containing the ‘No Derivatives’ term do not allow altering the license work, they do allow moving the otherwise unaltered work to a new format... Lenssen’s scanning and my PDFing are examples of such format shifting.
Well actually, I agree with Mike that his creation of a PDF is probably ok under the licence. Clause 3 which states that your right under the licence to "reproduce the Work" and to "distribute copies" of it includes:
"...the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats..."
And since Mike's PDF includes the whole work in its entirety he has simply taken the work from the physical printed document into the medium of a PDF.
But I have to say I disagree with Mike's assertion that Lenssen's reuse of the comic is a format shift not a derivative work. It could be argued that Lenssen's HTML composition of images (PNG files) scanned from the original printed comic might be considered a derivative work and therefore be in breach of the licence. Arguably it could be considered a 'Collective Work' per the definition in the CC licence, but unfortunately under a CC BY-NC-ND licence the work needs to be distributed unaltered, in its entirety. Leaving off copies of the front and back cover in the composition has altered the original work in the process of transferring it to a different medium and is probably a derivative work. Sure, the risk of being sued by Google for it is slim, but as a matter of best practice, the covers really should be included as well.
UPDATE: I did notice the version of the comic available on the Chrome press site does not include the licence information or the back cover.
UPDATE: The comic page has been updated to include a licence notification.
You'll pass this on, won't you:
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