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shahana dastidar
Monday, 9 July 2007
First post - website building & copyright
Finally the website is up. This is the second one I'm putting up this year. Some of you probably saw the first one at geocities which had the two dancing spidermen. That site's been scrapped and there's a link on it redirecting to this one. Why not continue using that one? Well, apart from the fact that it only gave me 15mb filespace, the free version did not support ftp. And publishing without ftp is not an option. Why not have spiderman continue dancing on the new site? simple answer. Spiderman3. my broken heart. 'nuff said....
Since I now have stuff up in the public domain, the weighty issue of copyright comes up. Till about a couple of years back, I'd have been more than thrilled if someone copied from me. Hell, I'd be happy if ANYONE even bothered reading the stuff I wrote. Then, of course, someone did copy from me and used some of my stuff for their work WITHOUT REFERENCING ME. Now if I was the sort of brilliant person who came up with vast amounts of original thoughts everyday, it would've been ok (perhaps). But if you average about one inspiration a year, then you certainly don't want someone else taking credit for it.
So I could just put password locks on my pdf files and ensure no one ever copied anything. Thats not the point. I do want people to read and copy from my website with ease - just as long as they quote me! Opening stuff with passwords is irritating.....and i'm fairly sure no one will bother going to so much effort just to access my stuff......or at least not till I win a Nobel Prize or something (cue - roll eyes, mutter 'fat chance').
So what am I doing to protect my intellectual property? Right now there's an obnoxious looking "all rights reserved" at the bottom of every page, linked to an even more obnoxious terms & conditions page. But there is an alternative using the Creative Commons licenses. Instead of reserving ALL rights which I don't want or need to do - I could just get a license that reserves "SOME rights". This will require a bit more research as there are several types of licenses that give varying degrees of freedom to site-users. So folks should be able to copy with ease without my permission as long as they reference me. Until I have time to go through that stuff though, unfortunately, all rights will be reserved. And anyone copying from me (yeah i know, fat chance) can just drop me a line.
In other news, tomorrow I'm going for a haircut after more than one year. Yeah the frequency of my haircut seems to match those of my original ideas. Is there a co-relation? We'll know tomorrow. Watch this space
Since I now have stuff up in the public domain, the weighty issue of copyright comes up. Till about a couple of years back, I'd have been more than thrilled if someone copied from me. Hell, I'd be happy if ANYONE even bothered reading the stuff I wrote. Then, of course, someone did copy from me and used some of my stuff for their work WITHOUT REFERENCING ME. Now if I was the sort of brilliant person who came up with vast amounts of original thoughts everyday, it would've been ok (perhaps). But if you average about one inspiration a year, then you certainly don't want someone else taking credit for it.
So I could just put password locks on my pdf files and ensure no one ever copied anything. Thats not the point. I do want people to read and copy from my website with ease - just as long as they quote me! Opening stuff with passwords is irritating.....and i'm fairly sure no one will bother going to so much effort just to access my stuff......or at least not till I win a Nobel Prize or something (cue - roll eyes, mutter 'fat chance').
So what am I doing to protect my intellectual property? Right now there's an obnoxious looking "all rights reserved" at the bottom of every page, linked to an even more obnoxious terms & conditions page. But there is an alternative using the Creative Commons licenses. Instead of reserving ALL rights which I don't want or need to do - I could just get a license that reserves "SOME rights". This will require a bit more research as there are several types of licenses that give varying degrees of freedom to site-users. So folks should be able to copy with ease without my permission as long as they reference me. Until I have time to go through that stuff though, unfortunately, all rights will be reserved. And anyone copying from me (yeah i know, fat chance) can just drop me a line.
In other news, tomorrow I'm going for a haircut after more than one year. Yeah the frequency of my haircut seems to match those of my original ideas. Is there a co-relation? We'll know tomorrow. Watch this space
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