I am licensing all of my blog content past, present, and ongoing under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported (CC BY SA) free content license. This includes my content published by the excellent WordPress engine at iquaid.org, and my content at iquaid.livejournal.com (deprecated).
This has been on my mind for a while, and in a discussion with Mel after she did the same thing, I realized it was time to fish or cut bait.
The bottom line is, I don’t know what value my content can bring beyond what it’s done for me already, and I’ll never know unless I assign the rights so that others can reuse or build on my work. I am specifically not using the no-commercial use (NC) variant of the CC license; most of my reasoning is inline with this article from freedomdefined.org.
If there any bad actors who would use the free content license in away against my interests or preferences, I have to figure that i) they would do it anyway and regardless of my licensing, and ii) who am I so paranoid of?
Seriously, when you have a choice to spread peace, love, and understanding or fear, hatred, and doubt … choose love.
Welcome to the club. 🙂
One of the things I thought through (in rather short order) when going through the same decision myself is “what’s the worst that can happen, and what would I do about it?” I concluded that the worst case scenario was really not that bad – certainly not worth the lost-opportunity risk of more openly licensing my content.
I’m glad you were able to work through your thoughts on this, regardless of the decision you ended up with!
i just read about some random person re-licensing their blog under CC, while riding the bus, listening to CC music on my Linux-based smartphone.
oh, the times! the people!
thank you for this moment! and all the best from snowy, icy Poland.