A few weeks ago I spotted that my post on the installation of the Biorock sewage treatment plant had been copied verbatim to the Biorock UK website. While I don’t have a particular problem with that I would have liked to have been given some recognition for the text and the photos.
Other text I’ve written for publication on the Internet has used the Creative Commons Licenses. There are a small range of these which let you control what people are allowed to do with the text, photographs, source code etc. you publish. My personal view is that I’m happy for people to copy my contributions as long as:
- They say who and where they copied them from.
- They make any modified versions they produce available using the same terms.
These restrictions align with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license so you’ll see details of that added to the pages on this site.
Of course, applying a license doesn’t actually force anyone to comply with it, but it does make it clear on what basis the work is being published and in principle it provides a basis for enforcing compliance with the terms of the license in court.
There’s a handy plugin for WordPress which makes it really easy to add Creative Commons license details – the Creative Commons Configurator. Kudos to George Notaras for writing that plugin.
2015-11-13 Update: The latest version of the Creative Commons Configurator plugin (1.8.14) now includes the license details in the Widget on the Main Page.