CC? Not for me, thanks
Shelley and Jonathon: actually, you aren’t the only two people in Blogaria looking at Creative Commons licensing of weblogs with a jaundiced eye, though you may be among the very few with enough energy to write about it much.
What strikes me as uproariously funny about the rush to CC license weblogs, though, is that probably the most useful feature of licensing something that you don’t mind having people use is the way that they don’t have to ask your permission before they use it. And you know how we all hate having people contact us, with our dozens of comment links and TrackBack URLS and semi-obfuscated email addresses and we-hope-it’s-spam-proof contact forms. I can’t think of anything more horrifying to a weblogger than to have someone contact them out of the blue and say “I liked something you did so well that I would like to use it myself, may I?” Why, I myself have twice had people ask if they could borrow a couple of sentences I wrote, and both times I found it a horrible imposition to have to reply, since I was entirely too busy dancing around the room shouting “someone actually asked to use those two sentences!”
If you want to put a Creative Commons license on your weblog, I say fine, go ahead; just realize that along with allowing anyone who wants to completely republish your work in any context whatsoever to do so, you are also giving up that thrill of being asked. Not having a license doesn’t mean that you can’t let other people use it, it just means that they have to ask, and you get to say yes.
I hate to post anonymously, but you’ll see why. In any event, I’ve been dying to make this point somewhere.
I’m so sick of this CC brouhaha, frankly. It ranks so much lower to me than something else which hit close to home – the legal ramifications of an employer either telling you what to do with your blog or firing you outright for it. I was saved by a hair – I had to sign an agreement to take down certain items, but others have not been so lucky. This, to me, is a much more important battle these CC’ers could be fighting for right now, instead of this pie in the sky giving away of copyrights as some sort of knee-jerk reaction to Eldred.
I guess I have somewhat bought into the brouhaha, here’s why. A CC license is closer to reality about most of the content produced in weblogs (or at least in mine) and the actual amount of protection it deserves (or will get). Virtually none of us have the ability to meaningfully protect our content. To assert traditional Copyright just seems pointless. No matter what I post, if someone wants it and doesn’t want to give me the thrill of saying yes to the request (as described by Phil), they will just take it anyway. Hey wait, I think I just made an argument for not bothering with either. How did that happen?
I made my own copyright statement (see link) and then added a reference to a CC license as a more formalized way of saying I don’t care who does what with it. I’ve never had the thrill, nor do I expect it, so this is my way of saying that it’s okay to spread around my garbage – uh, content.
Just pinging myself with a reminder to figure out whether or not I have anything useful to say about RegRead’s troubles, and if I don’t to at least drag it out of the comments and into an entry, to see if anyone else will say something useful, or interesting.
CC is a waste of time when it comes to weblogs.
99% of weblogs contain trite daily commentary rather than hard-hitting, interesting, intellecutal or useful content. (of course Phil, yours is the latter)
You automatically own copywrite on something as soon as you create it. Expressly stated or otherwise.
Im with you Phil, ask me for permission and I will gladly give it while jumping about, smiling from ear to ear that someone, just one person, liked something enough to want it.
Don’t ask me and use it anyway, and I will track you down and make your life hell.
That is how copyright works. CC takes away any control you may have had over how your property is used.
So, Natalie, tell me what happens if someone abandons their weblog, but someone else wants to be able to borrow something from it? how do they get in touch with the owner to ask to borrow that ’hard-hitting, interesting, intellectual or useful content’?
And that’s only a scenario that took me about 2 seconds to think of.
Definitely not useless… not at all.
Tell me more about what it is they want to borrow from it: there’s no case-law and little common sense reason to believe that copying an entire post from a weblog isn’t fair use (the weblog being the whole of the work, rather than each entry being a separate work), and mirroring an entire dead weblog wouldn’t just be a bit odd, it would seem to be unnecessary, since if you can mirror it but can’t contact the owner then it must be mirrored already. But mostly I just don’t get what you’re going to do with it. Dorothea’s put CavLec in the public domain: go, do with it… um, what they hell can you do with a public domain weblog, again? Code posted in or linked from it, which should probably be under a software-specific license, sure. Images (assuming we’re talking about actual original images, not something cobbled together out of stock photos and copyrighted works used without permission), you bet, and if you really want them under a CC license you should probably put it where it’s clear that that’s what you mean, in a gallery, say, but the weblog itself? My link to Opera, and the snarky title on the <a> element should be in the public domain?
We just hate being contacted…
The discussion about copyright, generally, and Creative Commons, specifically is continuing elsewhere, and I’m extremely pleased to see others speak out with their concerns, opinions, and questions. In particular, I loved what Phil Ringnalda wrote toda…
Public domain
Just because no one else will, I will answer Burningbird’s challenge. Everything about this weblog that I am responsible for, in the past and henceforth, I hereby cede to the public domain. Note, please, that the lovely photograph to your left (i…