Okay. I’m writ­ing a real post about the com­ment pol­icy (in response to this com­ment from Dale) just so it’s a lit­tle more visible/obvious/open. I thought about his remark and won­dered if he read the Copy­right page, or just the line “Sub­mit­ted com­ments become copyright-ish to Joshua Street/this site.” (That wasn’t an attack… just a ques­tion, and a poten­tial source of con­fu­sion. For the record, Michael, this isn’t directed at you… you just brought up the ques­tion first :-))

If there’s con­cern about me “own­ing” them, the word­ing sug­gests you mightn’t have read the Copy­right page itself. It’s pretty open-ended, par­tially because I reject the idea of idea-ownership to some extent (cer­tainly text own­er­ship), and also as recog­ni­tion of the prac­ti­cal­ity of copy­right pro­tec­tion on the Inter­net. That is, it’s impos­si­ble to keep some­thing in the one place even if you want to, so embrace it.

I’ve ditched my old CC license because:

1. It was too over the top and com­pli­cated for a per­sonal site. I don’t need that jar­gon. If you don’t respect plain Eng­lish imper­a­tives to copy or not copy in a cer­tain way, you’re scum, and there’s lit­tle long-winded legal crap will do to change that.
2. I don’t think there’s any rea­son, aside from van­ity, for me to require attri­bu­tion. It’s nice, but hardly some­thing that I should bind ideas or even just text to.
3. Noth­ing I write here is of sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial value. The excep­tion to that is poten­tial repro­duc­tion of some pieces that may be of use in com­mer­cial pub­li­ca­tions (web or print) as stand­alone arti­cles. And, in that case, attri­bu­tion would be really nice… I just can’t be both­ered try­ing to enforce that, or even hav­ing to think about it. In say­ing this I accept some mar­ket value for my work, but I don’t think it’s sig­nif­i­cant enough for me to care. And micro-payments are as much effort as nor­mal pay­ments to set up, and, to be per­fectly hon­est, I doubt anyone’s that inter­ested in my content.

This change sim­pli­fies my sitewide copy­right pol­icy… and it only made sense to include com­ments in that. Because this is a blog, and not a ‘zine or what­ever the heck we called these things back when they were sta­tic and non-interactive, com­ments are an intrin­sic part of it most of the time. They value-add (hah, yes, again assign­ing value!) the orig­i­nal arti­cle by aug­ment­ing its con­tent, illu­mi­nat­ing its foibles, and elu­ci­dat­ing alter­nate points of view where opinion/conjecture comes into play. Thus, to sep­a­rate them can, poten­tially, be dam­ag­ing to the content.

I don’t want to break that.

So far as I could see, apply­ing a uni­form pol­icy was the only way to ensure it didn’t have to be bro­ken. And I know I haven’t said this in the past, but I fig­ure if peo­ple are pre­pared to con­tribute their ideas to a pub­lic forum hosted by some­one else with rela­tion to an agenda set by some­one else, they’re prob­a­bly not too wor­ried about who reads them/where they go.

This isn’t a legal thing, mostly. It’s more about eti­quette. I’m say­ing it’s okay to take what you want from here, and use it for what you will. I’m — ten­ta­tively — includ­ing com­ments in that. Now would be a great time to read over my “Copy­right. Ish.” page and decide what you think for your­self — and if you’ve com­mented here in the past and want to tie your con­tent down, let me know. (Some­how… I’ll get the con­tact form going again soon, until then there’s always the mobile num­ber listed on that page, or that page’s own com­ment form) I’ll respect that, either by delet­ing the com­ment — if it con­tributes insignif­i­cantly to the dis­cus­sion — or append­ing a notice to it stat­ing it’s not for the tak­ing. I really think that is over the top, though.

If you have any com­ments on this, I’d invite you to use the com­ment facil­ity on the Copy­right page. (Com­ments are dis­abled on this post to encour­age you to use that instead. This is because it’s sta­tic, and more permanent.)

p.s. Note that some con­tent on this site is non-free, or only avail­able in a lim­ited form online. The pho­tos, for exam­ple, are avail­able in what­ever res­o­lu­tion is there… but I have bet­ter qual­ity source archived, which I’ll gen­er­ally only pub­lish on a whim or for profit ;-)

Tags: Joshua Street