License your work!

This post was inspired by the “I’m a creative commoner” post of the dammit.lt blog. Disclaimer: IANAL – I Am Not A Lawyer.

Why should you license your work?

• because it makes clear under what conditions can it be reused / quoted / etc
• because it is more probably that others will use it and use it in a way you are comfortable with
• because if you have to enforce your license (think of splogs), you have clear terms others have to comply with
• because choosing one license doesn’t mean that you can’t change it in the future (if you are the sole copyright holder of the material or if all copyright holders agree, the work can be relicensed – also the same material can be licensed under different licenses in the same time)
• even if you don’t specify a license, there are implied rights (given by the fact that you made your work public) and a license can help clarify the issues

Why use creative commons?

• because it is a well understood license and the compatibility between it and other licenses has been largely explored
• because there is an organization behind it, which can help you with legal matters
• because it has variants to cover almost all possible cases (do you want attribution? do you want to permit derivative works? etc)
• because it is much more likely to hold up in a court of law, should it ever be challenged, than a home-grown license
• because there is a whole lot of material out there already under a CC license, which makes can be reused by you (for example the pictures attached to my blogposts are all under a CC license)

PS. All work on this blog – unless explicitly specified otherwise - is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Picture taken from Jayel Aheram's photostream with permission.