I didn’t want to do this, but like many other bloggers I’ve been finding my content appearing in other places. Some places do a nice job of quoting it and linking back, but a couple sites have blatantly hijacked my content for use on their own blog. That annoys me a lot, especially when they’re making money from my content, or competing with me with my own content. Like WTF. This makes me grumpy.
As a result I’ve changed my license to the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. I’ve given this some thought, and I hope it doesn’t get in anybody’s way. I am a huge fan of fair use, and the Creative Commons license says that this license should not interfere with that, which makes me happy. The Share-Alike clause will continue to let people use and build on anything I post (code snippets, firewall rules, etc.), and the non-commercial part solves my other problems. Coupled with fair use it should still permit quoting, etc., which is exactly what I like. If any of this does interfere with something you’re doing let me know what you’re up to and I’ll get you written permission.
Thanks. As always I really appreciate everybody who reads, comments, and generally gives me hell around here. It isn’t worth writing here if nobody reads, and I’m really lucky to have a lot of you out there that have stuck with me. Thanks folks.
Now, maybe I can get to writing some *actual* content… 🙂
It doesn’t bother me. I just like reading your stuff, and I figure that it’s always polite to ask to use someone’s material, even if it is under a CC license. I know I like to hear when someone’s using my stuff, just to see who uses it where, but I don’t strictly require it, I just ask that they credit the source.
Hope you don’t have too bad of problems with the copy-and-paste (or import-via-RSS more likely) people.
Doesn’t bother me any, other than I it annoys me that you and others have to do this. As always I greatly appreciate your contributions.
Thanks guys. Yeah, it’s mainly just the import-via-RSS folks that bug me, though a fellow took an entire post of mine and reposted it for the VMTN aggregator the other day, which kinda bugged me, too.
I don’t want a license to stifle any sort of exchange/back-and-forth, though. For example, if I’m going to comment on someone else’s post (and I know I’ve done this to you, Matt) I’ll take as much as a paragraph as a block quote, citing the source, and then arguing my point. I consider that fair use, and it drives a bunch of traffic to the source because my readers get a taste of what’s at the other site and usually choose to read more. Plus it’s essential to have the context if you’re going to argue a point. I want people to be able to do that to me.
Legalities are tricky and annoying, and yeah Rod, it annoys me that I have to spend some time on them now.
Bob,
It’s one of those things; it stinks that you need to do it, but you have no choice.
Hopefully, I wont have to worry about it yet. ( have to get hits 1st, and my blogs still new)
I always quote text, in fact, I try to only post the 1st paragraph when link.
Roger L
http://rogerlunditblog.blogspot.com/
I had faced a similar problem. I tried to contact the site owner but the emails bounced. What was most frustrating is that since the infringing site had a better pagerank [I don’t know how. It was filled with plagiarised posts] it was appearing in search results completely displacing my site. So i did some little snooping. I checked the whois of the infringing site and it listed as administrative contact [email protected]. When I did a whois on parentdomain.com I got the phone number of the infringing sites owner. Called him up. He was really shocked. At first he tried to justify that “we just copied the RSS feed”. I told him that my content is copyrighted and he can’t just copy stuff. He agreed to take down every infringing post and he did. So in the end it ended well.