To copyright or not to copyright?
Sylvain Carle woke me up yesterday (not literally) about copyright issues. During a discussion regarding the startup listing initiative, he brought an interesting point that my blog had a copyright on it. To be honest, I haven’t really paid any attention about this when I installed the template, which funny enough, was an open source template. I guess we could argue about why the designer used a copyright instead of a Creative Commons license but that’s not the point.
This made me think seriously about the implications of having a copyright on my site. My vision when I started this blog was to help people like me who basically had no where to turn to and to help the community grow. Sounds good and fair, no?
Quick parenthesis, I’m a fervent defender of free information. Information wants to be free. Information IS free. I’m also totally against software patents, which is basically information processed in a particular way. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the implications of having a copyright while some of the information on my blog is “crowdsourced”. What about comments left by users? Can I claim these as “mine”? I don’t think so. I don’t want to anyway. Is this even enforceable if I wanted to?
Copyright issue is hard and I was actually looking into different licenses for my social news startup (for obvious reasons). However, for reasons that I cannot discuss now, I couldn’t find a license that protected the users the way I wanted to while being inline with the business model that I had in mind. What I need is a mixture of Copyright, Creative Commons and a license between two entities. Information wants to be free but no one likes it when it’s stolen away from you.
Back to my blog, I decided to remove the copyright and to use the Creative Commons “Attribution Share Alike” license. It gives flexibility to the community by allowing everyone to re-use information on this blog.
So if you haven’t really thought about it, I suggest you think about it for a second and rethink the way you control your information. Thanks Sylvain for noticing this!
