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Creative Commons: should I do it?

Date: March 16, 2003 | 11 Muharram 1424 Hijriah
Blog: veiled4allah
Subjects: blogs, copyright, law
I've posted a little about Creative Commons licenses before. Based on what I've read, I have a few reservations about the legal ramifications of some parts of the licenses. However, I think they're a good idea in general. The main reason I haven't implemented them at Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs is that I have three very different blogs here (A Quranic Journal, The Clipboard, and this blog veiled4allah) and I post very different types of materials to them.

For instance, everything posted to A Quranic Journal is in the public domain. Even if I wanted to put some kind of restriction on it, I have no right to since I'm not the author. Meanwhile, The Clipboard features excerpts and republication of articles by other authors. Again, I can't apply copyrights or licenses to those materials since they're not my own. The only blog that is my own material is veiled4allah.

Right now I have a notice on the bottom of each page of Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs that indicates what if any copyrights apply to the materials posted on that page and to whom they belong.

I'm pretty sure that I should be able to apply a Creative Commons license only to the veiled4allah pages and materials, but I'm still hesitant to do so until I fully understand the legal ramifications. For the time being, I've modified the notice that appears on the bottom of veiled4allah pages to more closely resemble the Creative Commons license I would want to apply.

Just as a final note on copyrights and blogs, all your comments here are under your own copyright, as a notice below the comments section states. I would be interested to see a discussion of copyright issues with comments. By choosing to comment on my blog, are you agreeing to let me publish these comments anywhere I want to in the context of my blog? Do I have any other rights as the publisher of your comments? What if you want to apply a Creative Commons license to your comments? Or make them public domain?

In fact, some people are already looking at this issue. I was visiting the blog for the Creative Commons site and they have a notice "By posting a comment on this site, you agree to distribute the contents of your post under the Creative Commons Attribution License" (this license means that anybody can copy or distribute the comment that you post, whether for commercial or non-commercial purposes, as long as they attribute you as the author of the comment). In this case, they've decided for their visitors how the comments will be handled, and if you don't like it, you don't have to comment.

Any thoughts on this?
~ Posted by Al-Muhajabah, a member of the reality-based community, at 04:12 AM

Comments

Kynn said: Total comments: 12   gold star

I've never really figured out the need for a Creative Commons license.

--Kynn

~ Posted at March 17, 2003 12:32 PM | Comment Permalink
moderator Al-Munaqabah said: Total comments: 996   gold stargold stargold stargold stargold star

My understanding is this. Copyright law applies automatically, as soon as you put your idea in some tangible form, such as writing it down. It automatically reserves all rights to you as the author. Even if you choose not to pursue it, any person who copies your work without your permission is violating the law.

The Creative Commons license gives explicit legal permission to people to copy your work under the terms that you set. If somebody tried to get them for copyright violation of your work they have documentation they can take to court to prove that you gave them permission to copy it.

In that way the Creative Commons licenses are a way of automatically extending permission to all people who read your work, so that they don't have to contact you individually to get your permission.

I think that this is an important issue online. It doesn't cost anything, really, to put a document online, and it doesn't cost anything to copy it, but copyright law allows people to say you can't copy their online content even if you attribute them and link back, unless you get their written permission. I think there need to be some changes to copyright law to account for the internet.

~ Posted at March 17, 2003 01:56 PM | Comment Permalink

All comments are copyright their authors

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