spherebox

If you’re a regular on our site, you’d notice the recent addition of the ‘Some Rights Reserved’ and the Creative Commons image plastered on almost all pages at the bottom. We have added Creative Commons rights to our site. Basically, it means that we’ve stipulated what copyright rights we keep, and what we give permission to freely, without you needing to ask us.

Creative Commons is basically a site created by Lawrence Lessig (a prominent law professor) which essentially simplifies copyright law, modernises it, and gives a creator full control of their rights. A full description of what it is about is available here.

We’ve opted to regulate our site under Creative Commons because it is simple and understandable by anyone. We’ve retained certain rights, such as that of attribution. We’ve relinquished other rights, such as that of reproducing our works on another site – you’re free to do it. If we hadn’t done so, you would have infringed our copyright by copying and pasting our works onto your site. Technically (exceptions might apply) anyway.

A full list of the different licenses available under the Creative Commons project is available here. For spherebox, we’ve chosen to retain our rights to attribution, non-commercial, and the ’share-alike’ right. The first two are self-explanatory. Basically, when you take our works, you have to attribute us as the authors. That is simply enough done – you basically stick a link with the words ‘original article at ryan.spherebox.com by Ryan Ratilal’. The non-commercial stipulation means you can’t take our work and sell it for a profit, which is commonsense since we ourselves aren’t making money from this.

Share-alike is less obvious. What we’ve opted to take is to stipulate that should you take our works, you have to license it under similar conditions. For example, if you reproduce this article on your site, it too has to have the right of attribution, the non-commercial stipulation and the ’share-alike’ right. We have also opted not to use the ‘No Derivative Works’ license because we want our works to be taken, improved upon, and republished! It means you’re free to edit our articles, add to it, remove the wrong bits, make it all shiny and humorous and add it to your site.

I’ve included a magazine article I found from the IEEE magazine which featured an interview with Lawrence Lessig and he talks about the Creative Commons project and what it is about, what it means and why its important. Download it from here.

If you haven’t already done so, head over to Creative Commons and choose a license for your site!