Sometime in the past week I got rid of my Creative Commons license. I had stuck by my non-commercial, no-derivative license for almost two years now, defending and justifying it to heavy scrutiny and arguments. While I still stand firm on those grounds, a CC license isn’t really the way to go for a weblog.

When I put a license at the bottom, it means that everything on the site is bounded by that license. My articles, comments, code, quotes; everything. By using a no-derivative license, I was hampering someone taking my thought and building on it. I know it is cumbersome to constantly seek permission before beginning a derivative work, which is why I got rid of it. The entire idea of a weblog is to share and receive — may that be ideas, thoughts or news and information.

Licenses for blogs are meaningless

Today, there are enough blogs that feed-scrape and replicate your content, while filling up their pages with advertisement to generate some revenue for themselves. There are also blogs that do the same, but go ahead and claim it as their own content. In this day and age of online plagiarism, having a license doesn’t deter anybody. They will do what they want to do whether or not you allow them to. The most you can do is ask them nicely to take it off, or use the terms of your license to force them to take it down. I have yet to see a license used in a legal lawsuit which deals with online content. Trying to implement your own license using either Creative Commons or any other license delegating service, requires you to read through and understand the terms. There is no way you can define your own terms, in your own language, using the existing services. This is where a simple “Copyright” can come in mighty handy, and that is the approach I plan to take from here-on.

The beauty of a copyright notice is that it has a universal meaning that is clear to everyone. Only the person specified has the “right to copy” the content on the page(s). It’s that simple, and there are no two ways about it. If you want to create derivatives, go ahead. Citations, attributed use etc. are all welcome. Everything, except copying. It follows from printed matter which contain the same copyright notices. Since weblogs are just online versions of printed journals, it is only fair they be treated the same way.

Licenses for code - necessary

I only speak about removing licenses for your blog’s content. Any public releases like themes, source-code, programs and the like should be licensed to protect your effort and time along with the intellectual property rights. For this, I again deviate from the Creative Commons which seems much more restrictive and limited in its use and understanding. I very much prefer the MIT-style or GPL license. It contains all terms that are important, while not restrictive for anyone who might want to use it in a creative way. All my plugins and (in the future) themes will be released under a GPL license, to save headaches for anyone who might want to use them.

Our job here is to promote creativity and ingenuity with our work, not to make a developer think multiple times before using our code. I would like everyone who uses a Creative Commons license for anything other than pictures and code, to seriously think again. Evaluate what exactly you want from your license, and how much safety net you want to allow others when they use your material. See if GPL doesn’t cut it (which is very unlikely). The more varied license terms we have to get used to, the lesser work we will actually get done.

I will be putting up the terms of my copyright soon enough. If you’re one of the people who was “horrified”, wait for it.