1. We’ll send a free book to the first person who gets a business with at least 10 employees to license the fair employment mark.
2. We’ll send a free book to the person who gets the largest number of employees covered by the license in the next month.
3. We’ll send a free book to anyone who gets a business with more than 100 employees to license the mark.
To enter the contest 1) get a business/employer to license the mark on line at www.fairemploymentmark.org, 2) send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “free books” and tell me the names of the business or businesses that you got to license the mark as well as your mailing address. If the business has a webpage, please send a link for that as well.
I will check to see that the businesses did in fact license at our site.
As I said in an earlier post, the licensing agreement can provide protection for non-US employees. So this is a contest in which anyone in the world can participate.
Here’s a pre-emptive strike against those who will want to rail against the contest idea. The books aren’t really free – you have to do something to get them. But that something is trying to provide others with a basic civil right – a legal remedy for the harms of discrimination.
Jennifer and I will provide a lot (but not all) of the book’s ideas for free in the coming week. We should have talked with Princeton University Press about the idea of making the entire book available — at least for a limited time. But we are willing to spend our own money (and believe me these books are not free to us either) to try to launch the mark by getting some more licensees.
If you want to reach people, do the most obvious thing and release the book under a CC license that allows information to be disseminated. Is there not a conflict of interest when using a traditional copyright license with your socially important ideas? Exactly what is your purpose in writing this book?
I do hope the authors/publishers don’t believe that allowing people to send the information in “Straightforward” (in its entirety) over the web means that people won’t buy the book. I don’t think I’m the only one who prefers to own the book (assuming it is a good book IMHO) and will still purchase a copy (if I have the funds) even if I can download it for free. It doesn’t make economic sense for me to print the whole thing out and I’d much rather read a book than stare at a computer screen.
Do you want people to read the book or buy the book? Obviously both, but do you really value the latter above the former?
Practically speaking, I assume there is not much you can do about it as that is a decision for the publishing company now (Princeton University Press, I do believe). But when you release a second book, will you approach the copyright issue the same way? That is, “All Rights Reserved”.
“Jennifer and I will provide a lot (but not all) of the book’s ideas for free in the coming week.“
Why not all? Because there is not enough time in one week to cover all of the ideas? Or because you feel that “giving away” all of the ideas will pervent people from purchasing a copy of the book? Please tell me it’s the former…
“We should have talked with Princeton University Press about the idea of making the entire book available — at least for a limited time.“
Why for a limited time? That doesn’t really help much in the long run. I say invest in your book using a proper CC license and perhaps that will help you reap the $$$ benefits in the years to come. What will sell more books is people being aware of your book – not restrictive licensing. You can generate awareness by releasing the information in the book in its entirety.