some rights reserved

There is a new trend in my inbox. People emailing to ask my permission to link to this or that and a few people who seem to be actually policing the internet on my behalf. So I guess I'll just go ahead and weigh in on the copyright issue. Here are my two cents.

my personal preferences:

I'm going to start with these because this may be all people want to know and they can stop reading and also it'll set you up for the rest of my bit.

You do not need to ask my permission to

• link to a post of mine (actually you don't need anyone's permission if you're just linking)
  
• add a permanent link to my site on your site (thanks btw!)
• post linked and cited photos or excerpts of my text from my site. you can either grab them and put them on your server or use the direct link to them.

Now please do not think (or worry) I am giving permission for people to take my images and put them up uncited and unlinked on their site or that I'm giving people permission to scrape my site and throw it up on their ad-bearing site or inviting crazies who want to pull my rss feed into their blog and pretend they are me. I'm obviously not. The thing is, those people don't give a shit what I'm saying here. They will do what they want regardless and I do not wish to treat every visitor to my site as if they are that person.

my reasoning:

To me, it's what the internet and blogging are all about -- quick and easy dissemination of information. Sharing of ideas. Without linking to other people's content half the sites I read would disappear, Boing Boing, Go Fug Yourself, Apartment Therapy, Design Sponge, Whip Up, etc. The idea behind this sharing is fair use which allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. Certainly infringement happens and content is misused. Such vulnerability is an inherent risk in putting any content out for the world to see. For me, the benefits considerably outweigh the risks.

from the creative commons website:

Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species.

Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

Thus concludes my book report on copyright and the internet. Thanks for listening!

Tomorrow, buttons :) Or maybe make-a-long if I can get some work done.