Dorothea Salo writes why she's not posting a Creative Commons license, which is of course her prerogative. However, it seems to me she ignores a point explained so well in the animation (which for some reason I doubt she's seen). She writes:
So [Caveat Lector] will remain my small gesture toward life. No copyright notice, no Creative Commons license, no nothing. Plunder away.
Current US copyright law says that works are automatically copyrighted; the lack of a copyright notice isn't indicative of a lack of copyright. Unless you explicitly mark something as in the public domain, it's under copyright and no one can enjoy copyright privileges (modulo fair use and the other applicable doctrines). The point of Creative Commons is to have a set of standard markers that say, "Yes, you can use this," in lawyer-, human-, and machine-readable forms.
Without marking each page that it's free to use, someone who wants to make use of Dorothea's work doesn't know if it's legal to do so unless he finds this item where she granted permission. Merely adding, "Caveat Lector is my small gesture toward life. Plunder away," to all the documents to which that applies would be sufficient. However, I'm curious to see how the machine-readability of Creative Commons licenses will be used.
(I'm still unclear on what uses someone could make of a weblog, but I added a Creative Commons license anyway. Of course I don't know, so I don't want to obstruct others' progress.)
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I was half-way through writing a long post on my own site about the same thing when I realized you had stated it much more succinctly than I could have done. Bravo.
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I didn’t express myself as well as I might have.
My central point is that I don’t want the first thing people think when they see something they want to reuse to be “Gee, legal?” There are so many other, better ways of thinking about writing. It’s just plain filthy that the first thing that pops up is lawyerspeke.
More lawyerspeke, even kindly well-intentioned lawyerspeke, is not going to solve this problem.
I am deathly weary of legal wrangles. Therefore I refuse to engage in them on CavLec, even so far as to post legal permissions.
This is not to say that I will make no response in the remote eventuality (read Jonathon Delacour) that my work is misused somehow. It is to say that I will find a more productive and suitable response than lawyers.
Did that clarify my position at all?
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Yes, that’s clear, as was other writing of yours I had read since. Thanks for the comment.
The more I try to respond, the more I feel I should read and think more about it first—so, sorry for no substantive response here and now.
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This stuff bears thinking about. I’m certainly not saying my knee-jerk response was the best possible.
So think away. :)