You may notice at the bottom of every page, right after asserting my copyright, I also assert that you have many rights that do not conflict with my copyright.  I link to a university’s library’s page on copyright and what it can and can’t be used for; it’s what happens under fair use and other places where copyright doesn’t prohibit use.

One of my theories on copyright is that we need to protect works that are not significant enough to be around 70 years after the death of the author.  I know that many authors do not find fame or riches in their lives, and maybe they will not even find it 70 years after their death, but what happens then?  Will there be a copy of a non-famous work 70 years after without copying and loose licencing?  I doubt it.  One thing about art is that it is done standing on the shoulders of the people before.  Is it any coincidence that Disney put out a bunch of movies based off of fairy tales in the early 1950’s?  Copyright had just expired on those works.  Do DJs make most of their money off of music that they make?  No, they’re not DJs then, they are performing their music.  DJs make money off of remixing others’ work.  Other people make money off of that too.  Everybody wins.

There are some people who are totally against copyright.  They have made licenses that force you to not be able to use a work unless you are willing to share the result.  This has been nicknamed copyleft.  Licenses that require derivative works to be released with the same free license use copyright to restrict use so that others can’t exert their copyright over a work.  Two examples of this are the GNU General Public License and the ShareAlike licenses.  They require you to share derivative works through copyright enforcement.  This is much more restrictive than public domain, where you can do anything with the content and don’t have to restrict what you do with the result.

The default license of this site is a ShareAlike license, specifically under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 License. I feel that if you are willing to share your works too, you can incorporate any of my works if you give me credit and give it away for free. If you want to make money off of my work, to gain respect, or to derive works that are restricted, you will have to do it in a way that is protected by fair use or by getting a different license from me.