Creative Commons License

I’ve been blogging for over 3 years now and have had my own website for even longer, yet have never cared about licensing issues related to my site or work. I didn’t think it was very important and didn’t have much interest in these issues anyway. Not even after attending a talk by Lawrence Lessig at a Tokyo university a few years back.

Licenses regarding electronic media or even free speech don’t mean much in the aged Pakistani legal system, but the increasing traffic I’m getting prompted me to take this matter a bit more seriously. Was just going through the various Creative Commons licenses (which, by the way, remind me of the GNU GPL license that a lot of open source softwares use) and have decided to use one of them for this site.

The CC licenses are designed to promote free speech while protecting your rights and freedoms and you have a choice of different licenses that you can use. I chose the Attribution 2.5 license license which allows you to (in layman’s terms):

  • “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”
  • “make derivative works”
  • “make commercial use of the work”

provided that the following conditions are met (again in layman’s terms):

  • “Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.”
  • “For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.”
  • “Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.”

For attribution, a simple mention of my name and a link to this site will suffice.

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