Attribution ShareAlike
published
Someone recently sent me an email, asking if I was aware that someone else was wrapping ads around all of my content and reposting it. I replied politely
- I know Ozh from IRC channel #wordpress, and he's a pretty friendly fellow. He's not a splogger.
- Several other WordPress aggregators exist which pull my content.
- All of my blog posts are explicitly licensed under a CC Attribution ShareAlike license (linked at the bottom of my site as "CC") which means folks are encouraged to use my material, provided they don't try to claim authorship of it.
I also share most of my flickr photos under the same license. After all, it’s not doing me any good to restrict the use of any of this content. Indeed, by sharing my content, I’m (hopefully) creating value for other people.
Today, I discovered that my photo of Henry Rollins is being used on the Wikipedia entry for Henry Rollins! The photo detail page correctly lists me as the copyright owner.
Everyone wins: Wikipedia gets a decent photo of the man, and I get the personal satisfaction of knowing that I’m contributing to the overall value of Wikipedia!