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.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License applied to this Blog by Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Hello
I’m a Lecturer in Architecture at Newcastle University and would like to point around 150 Architectural Technology students to your website/blog. Your background material and the documentation of the build process is excellent and would be a hugely useful resource for my students. I’ve seen the Creative Commons License that you’ve applied to the site – many thanks for doing that. Besides giving my students a link to your site, I would also like to use some of the build photos, so can I confirm with you exactly how you would like the attribution to be made? I’ve tried adding the CC attribution to a powerpoint slide, but it doesn’t seem to work in the normal way. I’m not seeing a name anywhere, so will it be sufficient to attribute the website?
Sorry to bother you, but I hope that you may have regular visits to your website from my students over the course of the next 8 months or so – so I would like to ensure I get off on the right foot!
All the best with the build – and please keep up the excellent (and very regular) posts/work.
Kind regards
Simon
Hi Simon,
I’ve emailed you direct with a response but in case anyone else has the same question, just include the following attribution text when reusing any content from this website:
Reproduced from Marsh Flatts Farm Self Build Diary (http://www.marshflattsfarm.org.uk/wordpress/) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)