My ebook collection of poems and stories, Once Upon A Time, is due to come out on the 28th (at least that's when rights to a couple of stories I sold will revert to me, and I can upload it to Amazon and Smashwords - it might take a couple more days for them to process it).
I'm going to release the text under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. This means that anyone can legally use the text, including putting it on file-sharing / torrent sites.
I'm doing this partly because I'm against the way that copyright is being used to give private individuals indefinite control over material that would have gone into the public domain, without those individuals having to give anything back.
However, I also think it will actually help me. In my experience people who create things often worry that someone will steal their ideas. I've seen this for board games, fiction, and role-playing games. I've found that, far from people stealing your ideas, it's actually quite hard to get anyone to take any interest in them even when you're giving them away.
Science fiction author Andrew Burt wrote that when someone put one of his books on a file-sharing site, that book got a spike in sales. So we'll see whether it helps me.
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