What Do You Do When You’re Good Enough to Swipe From?

If you spend a significant amount of time blogging, and you begin to build up some kind of audience—particularly if you’re dealing with “news-y” subject matter—it is almost inevitable that some other blog somewhere will begin using your stuff. By which I don’t mean that they’ll say they found this really great post and then quote you at length; no, they’ll just publish your stuff on their blog, sometimes even diverting your RSS feed to automatically update their website whenever you make a new post.

(I’m distinguishing, or trying to anyway, between “services” like Kinja, which could reasonably described as browser-based RSS readers, and sites whose creators are clearly swiping a whole bunch of similarly-themed content to, among other possible goals, derive income from ad impressions after people find them on Google. I’ve seen a few sites doing this with GalleyCat posts; at first I was perturbed, and then I remembered I don’t own the IP rights to the site anyway, so it’s officially Not My Problem. But then there’s just plain weird: One of my favorite bloggers found out last year that somebody was translating every single one of his posts into Spanish and passing them off as his own work.)

Anyway, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has come up with a bold response to the situation: “Feel free to steal my content,” he told readers Monday. “I release my copyright on this content.” All he asks is that if you do use his stuff, you give him credit for it, and it would be nice if he could get paid for his Zen to Done e-book, but he’s not going to sweat it too hard. He anticipates several problems with this approach, from the potential loss of e-book sales to the possibility somebody else might sell his content and keep the money for themselves. But he’s okay with that—in fact, just as I was wondering when I’d spot the Creative Commons license icon, Babauta went a step further, declaring his blog and e-book full on public domain material. In the comments following his post, he would later explain: “My gut feeling [is] that even CC licenses, to some extent, are controlling… and at their most fundamental level, they acknowledge the right of governments to control the distribution of ideas, while I don’t necessarily.”

Obviously, this isn’t a course most of us are prepared to follow. But it is amazingly generous, especially considering that Babauta hasn’t given up on his dream of getting a real book deal someday. I believe his writing on efficiency and productivity is good enough to accomplish that goal—it will be interesting to see if he can persuade anyone to publish on his terms, or what new content he’ll create to keep under copyright.

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