Sat, 10 Oct 2009

Blog Copyright

To make things explicitly clear, my blog is copyrighted and licensed as "All rights reserved". It even says that at the footer of every page. That means you may not redistribute any content without my permission. Yes, this means you, Ross Beazley. I may allow aggregation sites to redistribute my content, but the only sites where I have given explicit permission are Planet Debian and Planet BNM. I am unlikely to be upset if your aggregation site links back to the original entry and does not carry advertising, and will probably give you permission. If both these conditions are not met, you do not have permission and will not be granted permission.

[] | # Read Comments (7) |

Comments

Not that I want to question your copyright to your blog, but I want to nitpick: "All rights reserved" is not a license and does not mean what you think. It's only a boilerplate copyright notice text that used to be necessary in some jurisdictions until 1988 to have full copyright.

Incidentally, that also means that "All rights reserved" is not contradictory with the work being under any other license, including for example GPL or MIT.

Not that this matters that much, since by default you have not granted anybody a license to use your text (beyond fair use/citation rights etc. which you cannot deny anybody) anyway.

See

http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/law-copyright-all-rights-reserved.html

for more information if you wish.
Posted by Sami at Sun Oct 11 04:06:05 2009
Given your stated wishes, you might consider using a license like CC-by-nc-sa.  That covers the requirement to properly attribute, and the requirement to not use advertising or similar.
Posted by Anonymous at Sun Oct 11 04:46:28 2009
Sorry, that was probably just badly worded. I know that it's not a license as such. It's meant more as an explicit statement that content on my website is not licensed in any other form.
Posted by David Pashley at Sun Oct 11 09:13:54 2009
Unfortunately, your rss feed that you offer doesn't contain that statement (appart of being part of this very entry). I suggest you to limit access to your feed if you want to have it reserved and not blame others that they use what you freely offer.
Posted by Gerfried Fuchs at Mon Oct 12 08:14:35 2009
@Gerfried: It's the responsibility of the copier to check they have permission to copy a work.

Works are copyright by default (at least, in those countries that have signed the Berne Convention which is most).
Posted by Tom at Mon Oct 12 13:03:02 2009
registrar / Webhoster notified a while back, and again just now.  Perhaps there will be action...
Posted by Adrian von Bidder at Mon Oct 12 15:46:10 2009
Just for the record, it was OK if you just wrote copyright. You don't need a license on all the things you make, just to reserve the rights over your creation ;-)
Posted by Jose Luis Rivas at Tue Oct 13 04:04:44 2009

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