Comment rights policy

04 Nov 2005

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 ;-)