Copyright and You

Note: this post was originally intended as a comment to the previous post (by Ayush.) However, I thought I'd make it a post in its own right because it got a bit long and copyright is one of those things that are hazy to a lot of people and yet important in the modern world. Read it as if it were addressed to Ayush, even though it contains nothing specific about him or the blog.

You don't need a license to sue people. If you write something and don't mention anything about a license, it defaults to "all rights reserved". Nobody then has the right to copy it.

Most people, by not mentioning any license for content they create, default to "all rights reserved." This is bad for society as a whole as more and more content gets locked up, so the Creative Commons was created to give people an alternative, for everybody's benefit. You can put your content under a less restrictive "some rights reserved" CC license to allow the creation of a "commons" of art and literature (makes me chuckle in the context of our blog) that people can use as a basis for their own works. The CC allows you to fill out a form specifying what kind of use you want to allow, and generates a tailor-made license.

You seem to have chosen a very restrictive license (Attribution Required, Non-Commercial Use Only, and No Derivative Works allowed.)

I would suggest using a more open license, because if you are going to use such a restrictive license, you may as well not use any license at all. Remember, as I explained above, licenses are used to give rights, not to take them away. Without a license, your readers only have fair-use rights. With a license you can give them any rights you want.

Keep in mind that however restrictive the license is, people still have the fair-use rights. They can copy content for excerpts in reviews, parodies (making fun of us), personal use, etc. Nothing can take away fair-use rights.

Whatever license you put on the content, you are still its owner. You are free to change the license at any time. However, by specifically stating so, you can put your work in the public domain, which means that nobody owns it, and anybody can do with it whatever they'd like.

The extension to this is that you can only put a license on content if you are the owner. Since blog posts are owned by the authors, you need to get permission from all of them to put on a license. This is a worthwhile goal, since if we all agree to use a more open license for our content, we'll be doing a tiny bit (very, very tiny) to create a public commons of knowledge and art.

Think of this as a first attempt to introduce the basis of copyrights. Please see other sources for more information, as everything in this post is not guaranteed to be accurate. As always, don't trust a single source for any information.

Welcome to the world of Intellectual "Property", where the poor people are Bill Gates, the rich people are actually poor, and the big men with sticks are the lawyers.

posted by Roshan Shariff @ 8:26 AM