Still Working on the Licensing Topic
I've been working on IP licensing issues, and Creative Commons licensing issues in particular, for the last week or so. I'm writing a major revision of my first entry on the topic. However, I want to do more thorough background research. If the roads are in good enough condition tomorrow, I'll go to the law library and pull a few recent books on licensing to see if they help to fill in the gaps that I perceive in the work I've done so far.
Thanks to all for the comments you've sent.
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Just in case you don't have enough to think about (or aren't already thinking about this), have you considered what "the work" of a weblog really is? At the time, I nodded right along with your analysis that putting a CC logo/link/license on the main page of a weblog amounted to licensing every post, past and future, as long as the license offer remained, but I'm not completely sure that's right. Combination of two things:
Over and over, I've explained to people baffled by the way Blogger works with archives and what appears on the main page "your posts don't live on the main page: that's a temporary view of a few posts, but where your posts live is in the archives." For a heavy poster with a main page determined by numbers rather than days, or for some designs that only keep one post on the front page at a time, things just flit through the main page, possibly with only a teaser displayed there with extended entries, while their full, permanent form is only found in the archives. If that's the case, then when you auto-add a license with MT, adding a logo on your main page, and RDF to your RSS feed, I'd say that you might actually only be licensing the posts currently on your main page, and then going forward you withdraw the license offer on posts that fall off the page and out of the feed, while adding an offer to new posts. Seems like you would only be making a permanent offer for a given post if you make that offer where it really lives, at the target of your permalink. However, that's muddied a bit by whether the unit of "the work" is a post or a weblog...
Maybe even more related to your forthcoming fair use post, despite the fact that people act as though a post is a separate work, saying that you/they can't quote an entire post because that wouldn't come under fair use, I'm not at all persuaded that a post is a work. It's hard to come up with a good parallel, and I don't know as much about fair use as I should, but to me a weblog doesn't feel like a collection of individual works so much as a single work. Which throws a spanner in the works of my theory that you aren't licensing your archives unless you license them there, but luckily this isn't a topic where I'm in charge of answers, only questions ;)
Thanks, Phil.
One would think that Congress would have defined "work" in the Copyright Act of 1976, but it didn't. The definition for "work" is conspicuously absent from section 101, though we find definitions for "work of visual art," "work of the United States Government," and "work made for hire," all of which, of course, depend on the definition for "work."
There's nothing preventing a work from being tiny. My hunch is that a weblog entry, assuming it possesses enough creativity to be protected under copyright (and it probably does), is a work. Meanwhile, the entire weblog is a compilation (also a "work") with its own copyrightable elements of arrangement and display.
If that's the case, then when you auto-add a license with MT, adding a logo on your main page, and RDF to your RSS feed, I'd say that you might actually only be licensing the posts currently on your main page, and then going forward you withdraw the license offer on posts that fall off the page and out of the feed, while adding an offer to new posts. Seems like you would only be making a permanent offer for a given post if you make that offer where it really lives, at the target of your permalink.
Putting a license on your main page (and not qualifying it) is like putting a license on the title page of a book. People have to turn the page to get to more content, but they'd be well entitled to presume that the license applies to the whole book. Where you store the posts doesn't matter. The determining factor is that an unqualified license appears on the cover page, so that a visitor is entitled to believe that the license also covers subordinate pages.
In case anyone missed it, that italicized paragraph is a quotation from Phil's comment. I should have used the blockquote tag. oops.
>There's nothing preventing a work from being tiny. My hunch is that a weblog entry, assuming it possesses enough creativity to be protected under copyright (and it probably does), is a work.
My hunch matches yours. The way I phrased my notice tried to take that into account, as well as Phil's observations about archives. Related note: Mitch Ratcliffe is a belt and suspenders man. Link: http://www.ratcliffe.com/bizblog/