Sampling the CC licenses

August 20, 2005

I think the Creative Commons system of licenses is great. They are simple, clear and direct. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to find a license that I feel is suitable for the e-gineer site.

I encourage people to link to this site. I encourage people to build on my ideas and work. But, I don’t want people distributing complete copies of my work on e-gineer, commercial or otherwise.

I’m surprised that Creative Commons haven’t created a license format to represent the standard / implicit copyright case. I understand it’s implied and may even be against the spirit of CC, but surely it would make sense to provide it with all the machine and human readable capabilities they’ve managed to bring to the more sharing friendly licenses? If anything, it would encourage the use and awareness of the CC license format and ability software tools to use it more widely?

Anyway, as best I can tell, the Sampling license is the most appropriate for my needs.

My understanding of clause 6a in the license is that once used on a work that work can be used subject to those terms perpetually, regardless of whether you change the license. I’m certainly not expecting a flood of users, but I guess that means it’s important to choose carefully before using a license. So, for now, everything here remains under the implicit (no need to even © it) copyright license.