Copy­right of this web­site, includ­ing user-submitted com­ments (see Com­ment pol­icy), gen­er­ally belongs to its pur­veyor, Joshua Street. Excep­tions will be denoted where required, gen­er­ally cit­ing repro­duc­tion as “fair use”. Legally ambigu­bi­ous here in Oz, but this is a per­sonal site so I’m not that worried.

Dis­putes

If you think I’ve raped and pil­laged your con­tent and now you’re going to send an army of lawyers sig­nif­i­cant enough they’re going to need to rent an Olympic sta­dium to hold the trial, I have two things to say. One, calm down. I’m one indi­vid­ual, and any dam­ages you might pos­si­bly get are going to be sig­nif­i­cantly less than the cost of your lawyers. (Or even their legal fees for send­ing intim­i­dat­ing emails. And I don’t gen­er­ally respond kindly to those.) Two, more impor­tantly, please con­tact me. If you think it’s urgent (or the con­tact form is bro­ken), you can get me on my mobile: (+61) 0425 808 469.

Terms of use

On to more impor­tant things. Say­ing I have copy­right over every­thing on this site is a sweep­ing asser­tion car­ry­ing bag­gage I don’t want: namely, exclu­sive use of my content.

You can have it. For free. Ish.

The way I used to do this was as follows:

This work is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons License.

Which is per­fectly okay, I guess. Morally, though, I feel it’s too restric­tive. All I’m doing is press­ing a bunch of keys here. That’s not worth any­thing. On this point I fear I’m some­thing of a Marx­ist (I think. I never quite under­stood that whole thing, pos­si­bly because it branches and forks and con­tra­dicts all over the place.), but the point stands: at least to some extent, I think it’s wrong for me to claim own­er­ship over a bunch of words.

So here’s how it goes. If it’s some­thing I’ve written/created and posted on this site, and it’s not oth­er­wise marked, you can have it. Com­mer­cial use, non-commercial use, what­ever. Attri­bu­tion is emphat­i­cally encour­aged, but not required. Sim­i­larly, noti­fi­ca­tion you’ve used XYZ would be nice… and if it’s com­mer­cial, it’d be nice to have a copy of what­ever you’ve done. But, again, it’s not required.

Com­ments

Com­ments are a lit­tle more of a dubi­ous beast. I’ve asserted own­er­ship over them above, but it’s hard to apply that retro-actively. Hav­ing said that, it’s unlikely any­one will care too much. Still, if you want to be care­ful, con­sider com­ments made after Novem­ber 4, 2005, as hav­ing that pol­icy applied: not before. This means you can use it for what­ever you want, as per above. Again, attri­bu­tion (ide­ally to the com­ment author) is nice but not required.