I run a website dedicated to some of the interactive TV standards that are starting to be adopted in various parts of the world (http://www.mhp-interactive.org, for the curious). It’s been up about nine months, and it’s starting to get a name for itself within the industry, but it’s basically unknown to the world at large. I’ve got vague plans to turn this into a book at some point, but I haven’t gone looking for a publisher yet, preferring to wait until I’ve got something closer to book-length.
One of the main parts of the site is a tutorial section on how to use the technology. It’s fairly comprehensive, and it’s about 120 A4 pages if it’s printed, so it’s not exactly short either. Still not book-length, but there’s still a big chunk of effort gone into it. This originally started out as something to show my experience and my skills when I was last job-hunting, but since then it’s evolved into something that hopefully shares my experiences with people wanting to use the new technology.
I recently had an email from someone at a university in the UK. The university runs a Masters level Digital TV course, and the guy who has contacted me wants to use my notes as the handouts for his lectures. Now I’m not opposed in principle to this. After all, if I didn’t want the information to be shared, I wouldn’t have published it on the web. I haven’t formally registered the copyright yet, but that will change soon and so I don’t think that any copyright questions would be an issue here.
Now comes the question: should I charge them for it? I don’t care about making serious money off this site, but if someone finds it useful enough to give to their students, should they pay for using it? I’d never charge for an individual to access it in it’s current state, but if a company wanted to use it for a training course, I would charge. I’m not sure where a university fits into this at the moment. What do you think?
I know they could buy a book on the subject and use that instead (if it existed - one of the reasons I’m looking at turning this into a book is because no such book exists yet), but in that case they would be paying - or getting their students to pay for - the book. If it’s a small number of students, then there’s no real problem, but I’d like to get an idea of what the best approach is before I go any further.
At the moment, I’m thinking that some kind of license agreement is best, where they can print and use a certain number of copies of the site with some restrictions (e.g. I’m credited, no changes to my material without my permission, I retain copyright, etc.). Is this the best way to approach it? Any suggestions or alternative approaches are welcome.
I’d especially like to hear from any of you folks who have been down this route before. I’d like to help these guys, but I’m reluctant to do it without some kind of license agreement in place. I don’t need anything too formal at this point, but I need to make sure that there are no possibilities for it to get messy later.