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December 28, 2005
Copyright and a Milestone
As we wind down toward the end of the year, a pause for a moment of introspection seems appropriate.
First, unless we have a server meltdown, we'll have our 25,000th visitor today. That's just under a month since we hit 20,000, so thanks to our loyal readers who keep coming back to see what we're ranting about.
Also, we've taken the time over the holiday break to update our copyright policy. When we started Portland Transport, since we had no legal entity, we left copyright in the hands or our contributors. Now that we have our very own non-profit corporation, we're getting a little more formal and holding copyright in the name of Portland Transport.
This means that we can think about how we want the material used. In the spirit of the intellectual commons that we hope Portland Transport is part of, we've made most of our content (the part we actually own) available under a Creative Commons license. If you haven't heard of Creative Commons, you should definitely check it out, it's a very cool concept - the opposite of Mickey Mouse being under 100% control of Disney for perpetuity.
So you are now free to reuse most of our text and photos (get the details on our copyright page), as long as you give Portland Transport credit, and don't try and make any money off the reuse. Enjoy and spread the memes in the new year.
Posted by Chris Smith at 12:12 AM
Comments
December 28, 2005 12:24 PM
sunilonln Says:
Why do comments become the property of Portland Transport?
December 28, 2005 12:58 PM
Chris Smith Says:
Because that way we can them license them under the terms of the Creative Commons license so that others can re-publish or quote them along with the post itself in other locations (as long as they give credit).
The alternative is that the commenter retains copyright, in which case someone who wanted to republish a post and all its comments would have to find and secure permission from the individual commenters - kind of awkward!