Aaron Swartz was working on a book before he committed suicide in 2013. The draft was later published under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA) license. It can be downloaded for free from tons of sites on the Internet.
IEEE is charging $30 for a copy of it.
Check it out: http://goo.gl/1EwdLn (click that big yellow Full Text button to see the price).
Aaron was vehemently against sites like IEEE, Elsevier, and JSTOR. Putting aside for a moment the audacity of IEEE's choice to make money off his work, can a company choose to sell something that's licensed under CC or some other permissive license?
And if so, where does that money go?
And IEEE, at least for IEEE membership, is a nonprofit. Is this legal?
I checked it out and there are other examples where they are charging for content that the authors released for free:
Engineering a Safer World:Systems Thinking Applied to Safety written by Nancy Leveson
They split that book into 25 individual chapters, each one costing $15, for a grand total of $375. And it's an extra $15 if you want the book cover/table of contents! http://goo.gl/QVmRvU)
Open Access by Peter Suber. See Suber's blog post from May 2014, "Don't buy the IEEE edition of my book." https://goo.gl/kO3lkB
That's the same as the other book, split into chapters and sold for $15 each.
There is no way an individual would fall for this. But libraries and universities may not be checking. I have seen tons of posts about publishers taking advantage of institutions. Is this another example to slip one past the librarian?