Interestingly, after the discussion about copyright and Creative Commons last week, the writing-world newsletter I receive had an article about its benefits to writers, and the editor Moira Allen wrote an editorial saying she was now making all her content available under a Creative Commons license, and encouraging other writers to do the same (assuming they have already sold the content a few times and no longer think they can profit it - Moira is a strong proponent of the motto that writers should never write for free) to increase their visibility.
The article itself was written by one Josh Smith, a writer specialising in "copyleft". He talks about how using Creative Commons can turn the risk of piracy into potential profit, because if you make your book freely available for download, you defeat the point of stealing it, while letting consumers sample your work; supporters of this method strongly believe the losses from giving some of their work away for free through e-books are made up for the expansion of the audience (which can then be targeted for other products or for the paper version of the e-book). He also discusses the Developing Nations license, which allows people in developing nations free access to material they could not otherwise afford, while making sure developed nations only have access under normal copyright rules.
I can't link to the article right now as the website is down (it's exceeded its bandwidth; very popular and useful website for writers, I highly recommend it), but I'll add the link later once it's back up... and here it is:
http://www.writing-world.com/rights/commons.shtml
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That's true, but I think writers have been very cautious about taking it up because of the stigma about writing for free; it can be hard to distinguish between what will work as promotion and what is just being taken advantage of by all those people who seem to think writing is so easy and fun it doesn't need to be paid for.
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