You may have noticed that I have included a statement on this blog’s ‘home-page‘ to the effect that:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
This is standard blurb from the Creative Commons (CC) site. In the context of my blog this means – well, what exactly? Feel free to use anything you find here, for whatever purpose you like, so long as you credit me? What about material I include from elsewhere? What about other people’s comments on my posts? It seems to me that this just isn’t clear enough….
And another problem – I don’t necessarily want to apply the same license, indiscriminately, to all of my posts. I probably want credit/attribution for anything I write here, true, but I might feel differently about commercial re-use of the contents of different posts (although I’m probably deluding myself if I think that my blog has potential for commercial exploitation!).
In point of fact, I actually changed the license on my blog a while ago, to remove the non-commercial use clause from my Creative Commons 2.0 license. I guess this is pretty poor practice as it has, by implication, retrospectively changed the license I applied to past entries. So far, no one has complained…. 
Would it be better practice to attach a license to the text of each post, rather than to the blog as a whole? Is the ‘post’ closer to being a ‘work’ in CC terms? Even better, should I embed the license as a footnote to the content itself? Currently, my CC license declaration is simply an artefact of the user interface I host at http://blog.paulwalk.net/index.php – it doesn’t even appear in the RSS feed. If I licensed each post, rather than the blog as a whole, I could be selective about licensing content (perhaps maintaining a sensible default to avoid unnecessary work). And I could move to a different license later without feeling vaguely guilty. I guess I could include a statement making clear to people who want to post comments on my blog just how their comments are going to be licensed. Or even allow the them to select a license themselves….!
It occurred to me that someone might have developed a ‘Creative Commons License plugin’ for Wordpress, the blog engine used to manage this blog. In fact, I found two very easily, WpLicense and the Creative Commons Configurator. However, both of them apply the CC license in a system-wide manner, rather than to each individual post. This is an improvement over my current practice, as the license will show up in the blog’s public RSS feeds for example, but it’s not really what I have in mind. I’m pretty sure I could insert license statements in the necessary templates if it came to it, and maybe code up a plugin to allow me to select from a menu of licenses. However, it occurs to me that I don’t particularly want to use Wordpress as the ‘author’ tool (currently I use Ecto)
Whatever. I can’t help thinking that attaching a license to a blog feels a little like licensing the deployment of a content management system, rather than the content itself. Anyone care to comment?
Tags: cc, creative-commons, ecto, wordpress
Somewhat ignoring the point of your post, but I’m interested in why you prefer to use a client based app for blogging rather than the wordpress web based client?
To me, the web has the advantage that I can use it from anywhere and is just as quick and powerful as an average pc/mac software. In fact I often use google docs and other web based tools rather than the client based equivalents.
Does a client based app have advantages, other than being available offline?
Chris,
it is the off-line availability which is the most important aspect for me. I spend a very large part of my working life on public transport, drifting in and out of net-access.
Although a little buggy, Ecto is quite sophisticated. For example, it allows me to embed images from my local iPhoto library into draft posts while off-line, and then upload these to the remote blog system when online.
The local integration offers a few valuable conveniences – I use NetNewsWire as my RSS organiser and reader and can create new drafts in Ecto based on content in my RSS ’stream’ with a couple of clicks. No doubt this sort of thing can be achieved with Firefox plugins or the like, but I still need the off-line access.
While I have long believed that the ‘use from anywhere’ aspect of browser-based solutions is important – my previous ‘intranet developer’ career was practically built on this notion, it turns out that this is not so important now in my current working life as I carry my office, my MacBookPro, with me everywhere when I’m working. When I’m not, I have my iPhone and I’m happy then to use Wordpress’s web interface.
Cheers,
Paul
I think publishing a separate license for each post would be OTT and I would say your license should follow the 80/20 rule. After all nothing stops someone who wants an additional right from asking you, and you granting it.
For example I used to repost a number of Tom Tomorrow’s cartoons on my blog. His general license expressly forbids this. I wrote to him and explained that I wanted to blog some of his cartoons that I liked. He replied and said “No problem.”
Matt,
interesting – thanks. I should perhaps raise the ‘bar’ slightly and go with a little more restrictive license, thereby reserving the right to refuse commercial use, for instance, of my content. I’m sure that it is unlikely that commercial use would ever be made of my musings, but I think I’m developing a more cautious streak in old age….
Paul
Microsoft get Creative…
Microsoft recently (quietly) announced a Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007 that enables you to add a Creative Commons license to your documents (Word, Excel and Powerpoint)….