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I haven't investigated this topic [eg] in depth, but it seems to me Web content has two particular traits that demand special licensing consideration.
1. Maximising inbound-links
The whole point of publishing on the Web is to get widely linked.
If you have good content to offer, you want to encourage people to link to it, but even more you want to encourage them to accompany those links with samples of your content.
So long as the sample is clearly associated with a direct link to your source-page, sampling can be freely encouraged.
The test-question to ask is: if a person reads (views) the sampled content and likes it, is the link labelled clearly enough that they'll realise that following it will lead them to its actual source? (If yes, then no problem.)
Different authors will have different definitions of how big a sample is fair to use. I am experimentally taking the radical view, that a person can copy the whole page so long as it's clearly identified as such and clearly linked to the original.
2. The problem of stale links
I think good web-design usually demands many outward-links. [theory]
An hour with Google can easily deliver a dozen good links to supplement almost any content... but the big problem is that a year later, half of these will have expired.
And in my own case, I have little interest in doing the clerical busywork of weeding out or updating these thousands of bad links.
Someday I expect web-authoring programs will simplify this to a manageable level, but for now, I'm encouraging a more radical approach:
So long as you clearly identify and clearly link the original source, you can copy and modify full pages, and I encourage you to do this for the purpose of fixing my expired outward-links. The only catch is that your updated page must be offered to others on these same terms.
This principle is mainly intended for pages like my author/artist timelines [eg Joni Mitchell] because they're primarily reference-pages, not personal expressions. But as an experiment, so long as borrowings are labelled and linked, I am encouraging it for all pages.
Mirrors
In principle, I welcome even full mirrors of the site, so long as each page is clearly labelled and linked to the original.
Not-for-profit
These rules only apply for use in webpages, not in printed material or disks-etc that are sold for a profit. Personally, I'm not worried whether your copied page adds banner ads or not-- but other authors may care about this.
Modifications
Many other licenses require that content not be modified. I think this is unhelpful, but the test-question will again be: is the accompanying link labelled clearly enough that people will understand that following it will lead to the unmodified source (along with a general sense of the nature and extent of the modifications)?
Take-backs
It's likely that I've failed to spell out something that I meant to be included in this license, or overlooked something that I should have foreseen, which will require additions and modifications to it.
So if I see you taking advantage of my open-ness, I may ask you to modify things to conform to a revised version of this license, but if your intentions are good, these should be very minor.
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Web-design pages:
main :
academia :
info-design :
adding value :
resource-pages :
lessons-learned :
best-worst :
plugging leaks
Special topics:
surfing-skills :
url-hacking :
open content :
semantics :
pagelength :
linktext :
startpages :
bookmarklets :
weblogging :
colors :
autobiographical pages :
thumbnail-graphics :
web-video :
timeline of hypertext
Anti-XML/W3C/etc:
structure-myth :
page-parsing :
firstcut-parser :
html-history :
semantic web
Design prototypes:
topical portal :
dense-content faq :
annotated lit :
random-access lit-summary :
poetry sampler :
gossipy history :
author-resources :
hyperlinked-timeline :
horizontal-timeslice :
web-dossier
Website-resource pages:
RobotWisdom.com :
Altavista.com :
1911encyclopedia.com :
Google.com :
IMDb.com :
Perseus.org :
Salon.com :
Yahoo.com
Older stuff:
design-lab :
design-checklist :
HyperTerrorist :
design-theory :
design cog-sci
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