Cory Doctorow has released his third book, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m picking it up as soon as we get it at work, and you probably should too.

And it’s very cool that, like all of his other work, he’s released it under a Creative Commons License. This means that while you can buy it in bookstores, you can also download it for free at his website in a variety of formats, and you can publish, perform, or otherwise distribute the thing in any noncommercial way you deem fit. This is great, because not only is this the way writers should be presenting their work, it’s the way they will present it in the future once we get this whole copyright mess straightened out.

And so, to celebrate the release of the book, I decided to use it in my own way– I pulled the first 500 words from his website, and remixed them into the 183 word story you see below. I didn’t use all of the words, obviously, but every word in my story should appear in his. I did maybe add an “an” or a “the” in there, and I did repeat a few, and I did change the forms of some of them, but every single noun, verb, and adverb in the piece is from the first 500 words of SCTT, SLT.

I actually wrote it yesterday, and almost posted it then, but then I discovered it wasn’t quite legal. The license that covers SCTT, SLT is an attribution, noncommercial, nonderivative license, which means that you can use it noncommercially as long as you attribute the author, but you can’t legally make derivative works, including remixes. You can publish the book in its original form, but you can’t, by the CC license, change the book’s form. So I emailed Cory to see if this was true, if I couldn’t remix his book under his license.

He replied:

g’head and post your fiction — it’s outside the scope of the license, but you have my permission! (btw, it sounds like the use you’re making is a fair use, which doesn’t require a license at all!)

So now I can post it no matter what, because I have the author’s permission. He suggests that I might be able to publish it under normal copyright “fair use” law– so I did a little research into that as well. He’s right, basically. I could probably prove in a court that I had transformed the original work enough, that by only taking 500 words that I wasn’t stealing a substantial portion of the work, and that I wasn’t impeding on the book’s market because it’s already been released, and I was offering my story for free and with attribution. In short, I wasted his time, but good form for responding to me.

At any rate, enjoy the little story, and then go buy Cory’s book.

Wales Avenue was precious, ramified by hand-holding and steel. On January 1, Yorkville was glinting with the poetry of international currency, but Wales Avenue was ancient and sweet, packed with protégés, cellars, chemical stripper, and wooden bookcases.

Tony loved to break on Wales Avenue, away from his employees and bankers and fluorescent tube lighting. Like tin-toys, they ran and tortured and aimed financial metals and markets, but Tony escaped, loved the way he could deliver himself to this impromptu Annex. He could sit like a novitiate, listen to the poor gnomish lady who tended roots wax erotic about her heaviest flea and the repair of her disused coal cellar. Her lectures, rusting and twirling, spoke of purity, a damp smell of the smoking universal.

It was a rhapsodic thing, his surreptitious transaction on Wales Avenue. All about town, Tony paid wooden attention to news of sales, estates, auctions, of realtor principles and collectible e-gold transfers. But in truth, it was in the house on Wales Avenue that he benefited, that the value of beat-up nature, of warmed fingers and embroidered wool, was communicated to him.