Creative Commons License

A licence page sat in the menu of this blog from April 2009 until the end. This guide explains what a Creative Commons notice meant for a personal blog of that period.

What the page was doing there

Around 2008 and 2009 it became normal for personal blogs to carry an explicit licence, usually a Creative Commons licence, stated on a page of its own and linked from the sidebar with a small badge. The reason was practical rather than ideological. Blogs like this one published a great deal of original photography, and scraper sites were beginning to lift whole posts wholesale. A licence page did not stop anybody, but it made the position unambiguous, which is most of what you can do.

The typical choice for a blog of this kind was attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives: use it, credit it, link back, don’t sell it and don’t alter it. Creative Commons still publishes plain-English explanations of each of the six licences and what they permit, and the Creative Commons FAQ covers the questions bloggers actually had — particularly the one about what a licence does and does not do about people who ignore it.

Reuse terms

The collection follows these terms:

• The TP4WW writing that appears on this site was published by its author between 2009 and 2012.
• Other people’s material is excluded. Comment threads, commenter names, the badge images made by other bloggers and the memes created by other people are deliberately left out. Where a feature’s history requires mentioning that somebody else created it, it is described rather than named and linked.
• The current illustrations are interpretive. They are not period photographs and do not document the events described.
• Nothing here is a live service. See the scope page for context.

If something here is yours

If material that belongs to you has ended up on these pages — a photograph, a passage, a name that should not be here — the correct outcome is that it comes off, promptly and without an argument about it. The readers page sets out the privacy and ownership policy: other people’s words and names stay out.

The blog’s own disclosure and privacy policy is the other half of this pair, and its period text remains available.

What a licence could and couldn’t do

It is easy to be cynical about a licence page on a hobby blog, and mostly the cynicism is earned — nobody scraping a site for advertising revenue has ever been stopped by a badge in a sidebar. But the page did two things that were worth the ten minutes it took to put up.

The first was that it removed the excuse. Before licence pages became common, the standard reply from anybody caught republishing a blog post wholesale was that they had assumed it was fine, and there was no cheap way to demonstrate otherwise. An explicit, linked, dated statement of terms turned a vague dispute into a simple one. That is not enforcement, but it is a long way ahead of nothing.

The second was that it worked in the permissive direction as much as the restrictive one. A blogger who wanted their photographs used — on a school project, in someone else’s post, on a community site — previously had to be asked each time, and mostly was not asked at all because asking is awkward. A licence granted the permission in advance and named the conditions, which meant reuse went up rather than down. Most of the people who put these pages up were trying to be found, not trying to be left alone.

Both effects depended on the licence being specific rather than a general assertion of copyright, which is why the standardised, machine-readable licences won and why they are still in use across Wikipedia, open-access journals and public archives today.

Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou