or: What you don’t know about GPL, Creative Commons, Public Domain licenses.
This is not about affiliate programs but creating and selling your own products based on other people’s material. After reading this article you will be able to create and sell you own product today without any costs and of course – legal.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons licenses became very popular recently. The licenses are quite liberal and restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work. Big sites like like flickr.com are using them. Some licenses explicitly exclude non-commercial use; some exclude derivations of the work. The most liberal license allows you to do nearly everything you want as long as you keep an attribution to the author. You can find the details of the licenses and additional resources here: http://creativecommons.org/
GPL
The GNU General Public License is a very common license for free software. There is a popular misunderstanding of the word “free”. From the definition of the Free Software Foundation:
The word “free” in our name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. First, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. Second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you.
And to make it clear to everyone see this FAQ section: DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
One of the most popular examples of selling GPL software are linux distributors. The license details can be found here.
Public Domain
A work is in the public domain if there are no laws which restrict its use by the public at large. Laws vary and a work may be public domain in one jurisdiction but not another. Some works become public domain after the coyright expires (e.g. see the large collection of ebooks at gutenberg.org. Other works are intentionally published as public domain. For example nearly all publications of the US federal government are in the public domain with very interesting material (e.g. CIA World Fact Book, ….).
Examples:
Product: Language Course of the Foreign Language Institute
All of the language courses published by the Foreign Service Institute are in the public domain. You can download them for free at FreeLanguageCourses.com or buy the same material for more than $1000 (!) at multilingualbooks.
Product: books at amazon
The bestselling book “The Art of War” is in the public domain and free available at gutenberg.org. You can however also buy it at amazon.com (in printed form though).
Product: US Map Data
The USGS/Tigerline Map Data published by the US Census Bureau is in the public domain as well. You can download it for free. Just put it on a DVD-ROM and sell it like ajmsoft or agismap. Some companies bundle this to a working map server appliance (with a free map server) and sell it for several thousand dollars.
Ideas for you:
Product: printed book
gutenberg.org has a huge selection of classic books which are all in the public domain. Several download formats are available. You can just use the texts in it’s original form or change them as you like. The Lulu print-on-demand platform makes it very convenient for you to publish your own book. You can for example take one of the gutenberg Top100 books, format the text nicely, design a cover and sell it as a printed book on Lulu. You can go from 0 to your own book within one hour! It is very esay and free to create a lulu.com account and setup a book-publishing project. You will receive your revenue conveniently via paypal.
Product: Audiobook on CD
A huge amount of good classics are available as audiobooks on librivox.com. The site depends on community efforts. Everybody can be a speaker for audio books. So the quality varies, but usually has quite high standards. Conveniently the new audio-product is still in the public domain (this must not generally be so). You can for example sell those audiobooks on Audio-CD or as collections on CD-ROM/DVD-ROM via Lulu. Both will be created on demand including nice printed covers. As usual marketing is the key. You will need a good cover and sales page and some creative methods to get people to notice your product.
Product: Photo Calendar
Many photos on the photo-sharing website flickr.com are under a Creative Commons license. You can filter the pictures by license and might want to filter them for the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. You might additional sort the results by “most interesting” and you will get very good pictures on your keywords. The publishing service lulu.com allows you to publish photo calendars. You could now create some niche-calendars with high quality flickr photos and sell them through lulu.com Note that you have to add an attribution to the author when you use the creative commons license mentioned above.
These are just a few examples of the possibilities. After a bit of brainstorming you will see there is a lot more to do!
Tags: business ideas, creative commons, free, gpl, marketing, passive income, public domain