Arizona State Sports & Entertainment Law Journal

Susannah Breslin wrote several short stories. However, over the years she had never been able to have her story “The Hardyman” published. She eventually decided to publish it under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License through her blog. It was meant to be free to the public, however Ms. Breslin discovered, through a google search, that someone had begun selling the story through iTunes for $.99. Ms. Breslin contacted iTunes and had her story taken down from the site, and the person who was selling it had their account removed.

However, the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license permits resale of works. This is definitely a lesson in reading the fine print and enforcing your copyright rigorously. Technically, iTunes did not have to remove the posting, but it was likely easier for them to simply take down the work than to argue the problem.