Here a story about a new company using crowd funded approach to putting books under Creative Commons licenses. The company allows individuals or institutions to join together to pay rights holders to re-license the works under a CC license.
In this process, the book’s digital rights holder sets the price to make a book as a Creative Commons, DRM-free e-book. Then the company starts a crowd funding campaign to raise money to set the book “free.” Once the money is raised the book is released and the company takes a commission.
Not sure that this business model will work beyond a select set of content, but it is yet another interesting twist on the content market.