I’m not a big fan of copyright or the various other kinds of
intellectual property
in existence. In fact, I despise the idea,
and try to evangelize people to accept my own viewpoint of total freedom
of information.
Hence, caring for Copyright and the Gang isn’t really for me. Mostly I have no need to incorporate copyrighted material on the site—if they can do it, so can I. But if I ever have the need to borrow material, I most likely will not care for proper attribution, or, especially, the research it takes to get it right the first time around. So if this ends with me infringing on your copyright, you can mail me and I’ll take the proper course of action. (Which, of course, does not necessarily mean that the material will go offline. That sorta depends.)
Saying the above makes me basically a thief then, right?
Hell no. I’m in fact a big fan of practice‐what‐you‐preach: I hereby relinguish all intellectual property rights on the information presented on this this site including, specifically, the right to copy, use, or whatever you damn well please, any and all material presented herein, with the reservation that I cannot guarantee that all of it is actually under my control in the legal sense. As I said, I truly think all the material really is free, but in this era of expansive interpretation of intellectual property law nobody, and I really mean nobody, could really be sure.
So how come the site has copyright notices all over it, then? Well, because it has to. The reasoning goes, one has to have a copyright in order to give it away in the first place. I acknowledge that copyright as visibly as possible, in order to make it clear who controls the stuff, and to encourage people to attribute any material taken from this site to me. I too would like to be known for what I’ve created.
With that out of the way, you are allowed to use the material freely, without attribution if you so wish. By all means plagiarize, if that’s your sport. In formal terms, all rights, including, but not limited to, the rights to copy, redistribute, sell, lease and make derivative works of the material, plus the so called moral rights under the Berne convention, are hereby relinguished in their entirety to the public domain.
But if you borrow my stuff, do follow the example. Free your bits. And not just under the GPL or some other similarly restrictive licence, but totally. Use Napster/P2P. Tell your mother. Mail your MP about the evils of intellectual property. Anything. Simply because the total annihilation of intellectual property would be a giant leap towards true liberty.