This article is licensed under Creative Commons for public use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/
Plagiarism is an issue that has always plagued writers online and those of us that offer our stuff for free are most at risk for this. I am testing a program called "Creative Commons" which helps to preserve some of the rights to your articles when they are distributed freely. The idea is to protect you from abuse while offering a stated public license to your work which allows you to specify what rights are reserved, including copyright.
I'll be distributing this article on the concept widely through the various free content lists, including my own at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/free-content/ where over 1000 list members post an average of 200 articles a month for free distribution.
Take a look at the web site for the non-profit Creative Commons organization
http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/
Where the stated IDEA is:
Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation's GNU
General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed
a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works
to the public domain -- or retain their copyright while licensing
them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the
GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not be designed for software,
but rather for other kinds of creative works: web sites, scholarship,
music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to
build upon and complement the work of others who have created public
licenses for a variety of creative works.
The part that I find valuable is that line stating
"...or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain
uses, on certain conditions..."
This perfectly reflects the idea of the free-content list of allowing
free public use of our articles with the required "resource box
links" stated by most online authors seeking wide dissemination
of their writing while maintaining copyright and prohibiting commercial
use if desired.
The Creative Commons site offers code to place on your site to make
your license "machine readable" based on a W3C standard (W3C stands
for the World Wide Web Consortium standards body) which links back
to the creative commons web site and the appropriate licensing restrictions
placed on the work displaying the graphic.
I have placed that graphic on my own site both on my ezine archive
page and on several of the article pages themselves. But the key
to this is the code placed in the < head> section of your site.
It looks like the following, with variations based on your own chosen
license from among several variables.
< License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/li censes/by-nd-nc/1.0">
< requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution"
/>
< permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction"
/>
< permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution"
/>
< prohibits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/CommercialUse"/>
< requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />
< / License>
< /rdf:RDF>
-->
Note that I've placed an extra space after left facing brackets
to make the code visible in HTML mail readers or for AOL subscribers
and other web based email accounts. You get this code from their
site after choosing your license.
Notice that this license has five attributes listed within it:
Each of those are rather clear two word descriptions of what might
otherwise be pages of legalese, but the last one may need clarification
for some. The link in the code provides this to us.
"copyright and license notices must be kept intact"
I've toyed with the idea of requiring this to be posted in the head
tag at the sites who republish my articles, but this is probably
too much to ask of many of the small webmasters who use these pieces
since many either won't understand what you are asking them to do
or will botch the code while pasting it into their own page. The
most obvious drawback is that those who use the articles in email
publications or printed newsletters don't have access to the license
link within that machine readable code meant for online publication.
The obvious solution to that would be simply to require this link
within your article resource box next to a BRIEF description of
that license.
If you have a broadband connection, Creative Commons offers an animated
1.5 mb Flash film on the basics of the concept of "cc" over "C"
or, Some Rights Reserved versus All Rights Reserved at the following
URL.
Much of the concept centers around pre licensing of certain rights
to the public to your creation, writing in our case. The idea is
plainly stated within the Creative Commons flash movie that we are
attempting to eliminate the intermediaries - mostly attorneys. ;-)
This is interesting since the Creative Commons founders are themselves
attorneys. These attorneys include famed Stanford internet legal
scholar, Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas, as well
as Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Lessig is well known for battling
the Copyright Term Extension Act in a Supreme Court Case against
the extension of copyright. CTEA extends copyrights 70 years after
the death of the artist and, for those copyrights held by corporations,
a total of 95 years in duration. http://www.copyright.gov/pr/eldred.html
The actual text of the law is available for download here:
The Creative Commons license is likely to be at the heart of internet
copyright issues for years since it is known and discussed by attorneys,
but I have yet to see it mentioned in discussions by Authors. Shall
we begin talking about this or simply leave it to the attorneys?
