When I publish a full RSS feed on my sites, I actually want people to copy and place the content on their site, including links and a linkback as the original source. I have no problem with that at all. Spread my words, share my points of view, use the content in that fashion. That approach helps me and helps you at the same time. It brings you content and it helps to spread my assistance through thoughts and words.

It’s that next step that leaves me teetering. That blanket authority to say to people take my content and link back if you want. You see it’s the “if you want” part that gets me. Like I said, I’m all for take the content, but attribution and linkback, please.

I feel like that approach still makes me an open source blogger. Certainly it makes me more open than the majority of bloggers out there.

Some people are just absolute idiots about this approach and send nastygrams when you excerpt a few sentences and link to them. Dude and dudette, WTF! Why would you not want others to excerpt part of your public words and link back to you? That is just plain crazy. Do you want to write so nobody finds your work.

Think about it like this, they make a movie and won’t put out a trailer because it has a few scenes from the movie in it.

I honestly don’t think that you have to give up all your rights to call yourself an open source blogger, but at least you should be willing to let others lift your entire post, links and linkback and use it on their blog.

That’s what I’m thinking.

Steve

It is interesting to see the difference being being an open source blogger and letting people steal or use your content and actually putting that into practice. I don’t blame him for getting attentive that his content was being used as he offered because reality is different that rhetoric.

In the end, this site won’t help him to be a bigger name, or give him more page rank love but by publishing his content as invited it did give him just that bit more public awareness to people that otherwise would not have looked for or known him. And isn’t that what marketing through sharing content is all about?

It seems that as open source bloggers we either need to realize that the words and content we produce is a marketing message that can go out into the world, be used, and attract new readers to help build our web presence or we must become tight fisted on our content. In the end, which approach is best? I guess it depends on what you want your goal to be, awareness or just being there.

Q1: David, some would call you foolish while others view your recent move to give away your blog content for others to use and bravery. Before deciding to offer an uncopyright on your work, what went through your head?

It wasn’t quite as difficult of a decision for me as you might think. I’ve never really been a fan of copyright, at least not the current model of it. When this country (USA) started copyright was something like 7 years or 14 years, enough to make a small profit before turning over whatever it was to the public for everyone to then profit. So I’m just skipping that initial 7 years. In terms of money and fame, which is really what we are all thinking about when we look at copyright, I don’t think a lack of copyright is going to hurt the possibility of either of these things, and may even help them. Consider this: Would we still know who Dracula and Sherlock Holmes were if those texts weren’t in the public domain? Maybe, maybe not.

Q2: Since offering the world unfettered access to your blog content has that resulted in a positive experience for you and/or new opportunities?

You mean besides this interview? No real new opportunities yet, but a lot of kind words from people which is nice.

Q3: The question on the mind of a lot of bloggers is that their content is theirs and theirs alone and nobody has any right to use any of their content. Does that content position make sense to you today?

Well, it’s not up to me to judge what others do. If they feel their content is theirs and want to hold it close, more power to them. To me personally, I don’t know if the position has ever made sense. Specifically in regards to writing, the purpose of writing is to share. Everyone wants their writing to be read. I suspect that even people who write privately in journals and diaries hold the secret hope that sometime after their death someone will read what they wrote. Limiting access to one’s writing seems to go against this basic reason.

Q4: What percentage of your work do you think people use and link back to you or give you attribution?

Well my blog started as a family only affair. Recently other people have started discovering it and this has led me to expand it and make it more accessible to the public, but many of my essays and articles are very much just directed at family and friends, so I’m not sure how many people will even want to use those! But I think most people who use my work will at least give me credit. Not like it will cost them anything. But if they don’t and want to pass the work off as their own instead, well, I’m honored.

Q5: You’ve joined the ranks of some pretty powerful bloggers in boldly giving away your work for people to use. What do you think the lesson is that the big bloggers, including yourself learned that the smaller bloggers have not?

I don’t know if I would call myself a big blogger, but thanks. I don’t know what the lesson would be, honestly. Good karma, maybe.

Q6: What is your opinion about how protectable web content is to begin with, especially the written word?

Me: Well, nothing can stop people from taking content. Especially with text. Just highlight it, copy and save into another file. Copyright is not really about stopping this –that would be impossible — it is more about stopping people from then turning around and selling the content without intent to pass any money back to the author of the content. So, no, I don’t think web content can really be protected at all.

Q7: How do you respond to the statement that I hear from others, “My blog content is how I want to earn my income. Why would I ever consider giving it away? Only fools would do that.”

In terms of blogging, a blogger earns an income based on traffic, and the only way to maintain traffic is to constantly produce new material, so thus older material matters less than new material anyways, but one can argue this both ways pretty effective so it comes down to your own personal feeling.

Q8: Are we crazy for giving away our work for free?

Yep. But to give a positive spin there, many of the people we worship as some of the brightest in history were called crazy for most of their lives too, so we are in good company.

That really made me think about how beneficial the concept of open source blogging really is. If you let go of the fear that someone may “borrow” your work and instead just concentrate on producing content, imagine the relief that you will feel.

It’s a bit like that old expression, “You don’t own your stuff, your stuff owns you.” A couple of years ago we moved from the United States to the UK and I think we got rid of 80% of our stuff and it was a nearly magical freeing experience. Once I didn’t have to care for stuff, store stuff, insure stuff or move stuff, my life got a whole lot simpler. And now that we’ve moved back from the UK, after two years abroad, I’m still enjoying not accumulating stuff.

I heard a rock star interviewed on the radio once, Sting I think, and the DJ asked him if he enjoyed having a lot of money. The answer surprised me. He said that he really didn’t enjoy all the money because with the money came the fear that people were trying to steal it from him, the obligation to have to watch over it and the responsibility to make sure that it was properly managed.

In a lot of ways, letting go of your white knuckle clenched fist on your blog content is a lot like that. The moment you stop trying to push everyone away from freely using your content then that is just another part of life that you don’t have to deal with. You can take that time and anxiety and use those moments for something else. Something more enjoyable.

Take this blog for example, I’m hoping that people come and steal my content and give me a link back for it. I hope that these thoughts and concepts benefit others. And I release my work here into the world to be used and used and used again.

One day I’ll be gone, but hopefully a spark or motion that grew from my work will develop momentum and value and move forward to help or benefit a lot of people. I agree that is a very zenish outlook but the benefits of letting go of your work, letting other people use it freely and being appreciative of a link and attribution back to your site is more than enough to expect, if you let it be.

I promised that in my next post, this one, I was going to talk about what I learned about being vigilant about trying to protect my online content and why I’m less fussed about it today.

Let’s talk about some experiences and realities for a moment:

• The minute you publish your information and content on the web, it is fair game. Now maybe it shouldn’t be but that is just the way it is. And rather than force people into hiding who utilize your content, why not just embrace it and ask for the link back to your site. You’ll get more traffic that way.
• Most bloggers set themselves up for reducing exposure and their sphere of influence. I can’t tell you how many times I have contacted bloggers asking for permission to republish something brilliant they wrote only to receive no response. Why? Was it to protect their original post that now fewer people will read? Or maybe they just did not want to share, who knows. If you are going to be a successful blogger it is because you have something valuable to say and people want to read what is on your mind. If people don’t know about you or your blog, how will you grow your sphere of influence? Why limit or restrict people that want to republish or link to something you say?
• RSS makes it very easy to distribute your content. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to view your feeds in their browser or feed reader without ever visiting your site. Bloggers have a choice between supplying a full text feed or a summary feed to bring people back to their site. The very nature of the RSS feed makes it easy for people to redistribute your work. In fact this blog uses automated tools to republish the feeds from open source bloggers and that gives those bloggers even more exposure and links back to their sites.
• Bad people will steal your stuff anyway. I learned a long time ago that there are some bad people online but then again there are some bad people in the offline world as well. Facing down those people, those content stealers, leaves us with two choices. Option A is constant policing and confrontation or Option B is to focus on new content and creative work and let people use that work and let them link back to you. Good people will, bad people won’t and there isn’t a damn thing you can do to change that.
• Legal action to go after someone is expensive. What I learned in my early days about going after people that stole my content with lawyers and lawsuits, was that in the end, it was pointless. It took money, time, money, energy, money and aggravation. Now don’t get me wrong, I won every case but in hindsight, it was a complete waste of time and creative energy. What I learned was that unreasonable people will behave unreasonably.
• Nothing anyone, including myself, has to say is so valuable as to be worth restricting it. I do a lot of public domain research and writing and because that information is in the public domain it lives again through me and others. Books that I have written and published conventionally through publishers will die a slow death on the lost shelves of basements and libraries. Because those books are tightly protected by publishers, those words, thoughts and information will be lost and not exposed to many others that could have benefited from them. What good does that serve? My work is protected, but lost. One of the greatest books of all time that I have read in my life, How To Live 365 Days A Year, is essentially lost because it belongs to a traditional publisher. The words and thoughts inside that book are so important but locked away. If that book was accessible by more people then not only would readers benefit but the author would be well known, instead of lost and forgotten.
• Traffic and awareness create opportunity and money. Without awareness of your work the majority of bloggers will never be heard unless they want to invest money on advertising or life currency in working harder and harder to get their work out through guest posts and linking. Why not just let people use your work and link back to it if they want to to let you build awareness while you sleep? Makes sense.
• People will link back. I have found that the more permission you give people to use your stuff, the more likely they will and link back to you in appreciation. The majority of people do good things and help you, rather than hurt you.
• Why blog in fear? I learned that once I gave up caring who used what and where, the more liberating and freeing it was to the creative process and the writing that I do. I also learned that the more people used my stuff, the more people searched for the information that I wrote and that always came up strongly in the search engines and that led to more traffic. Take this blog for example, it will be interesting to see if it grows and if awareness spreads. This blog started from zero subscribers and will only grow if I write something worth reading and people know about this blog from the use of my information and material by others.

What I learned from being online since 1994 is that I refuse to blog in fear. Use my work, link to me if you want to and just know that my life is richer for being brave enough to have that point of view.

Not all that long ago several very well know bloggers, whose names I recognized, Joe Pulizzi, Trent Hamm, Leo Babauta, Robert Scoble, and Chris Pirillo, took a brave new step and publicly stated that people were welcome to steal and reuse their content with their blessing. Some call it crazy, but is it?

These guys aren’t newbies to the web and with hundreds of thousands of combined daily readers of their sites, these are not blogging novices.

My first introduction to the concept of open source blogging was the post on The Simple Dollar by Trent Hamm and I think he stated the case for open source blogging very well.

I hereby release all copyright on all written (non-comment) material on The Simple Dollar to the public domain.

What does that mean? If you want to reuse an article from The Simple Dollar in your newspaper, newsletter, or anything else, go right ahead. If you want to hand it out in your Consumer Ed class, print it out. If you want to edit it to suit your own needs, go right ahead. All written material on this site is now in the public domain.

Obviously, if you do use it, I’d appreciate some attribution (Trent Hamm) and a link back to The Simple Dollar (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/).

Why? Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting a ton on The Simple Dollar, why I write it, and what I want to do with it. The more I considered it, I really began to realize that the whole reason I write The Simple Dollar is for you, the reader. That’s it.

I write so that someone out there who’s desperately scared about their debt situation might find an answer that they need, or the right piece of help at the right time. I write so that people who are in good financial shape have a place to bounce ideas off of each other, often taking what I write in an unexpected direction. I write so that maybe, just maybe, I can help the average person out there make a better decision or two about their money and then sleep better at night because of it.

By releasing all of the written content into the public domain, I have a far better chance of actually reaching people than I ever would keeping that content here and restricting the rights of people who want to share it. Maybe an article from this site will now show up in a community newspaper, where someone without internet access, down on their luck, will read it and get inspired to make a change in their life. Maybe something will show up in another web forum somewhere.

What about… There are obviously some downsides to this decision.

Losing revenue? Making money is very, very nice, but it’s not my biggest goal. If it were, I wouldn’t have abandoned most of my advertising a while back. Obviously, I greatly appreciate donations, but they’re not the end-all. I’d much rather have something I say reach the people who need it.

Fewer Google searchers coming to visit? If my information is out there in more place, more people will read it, not less.

Control over your work? If someone more talented than me can come along and spin my words into something great, go for it! If someone less talented than me takes my work and butchers it … well, then, they probably won’t build much of an audience anyway. If someone merely republishes it without attribution, at least the readers will get something of value out of the content.

As for the other issues I’ve thought of, they’re all so minor that they don’t even merit a notice compared to the value of helping people when they need it.

So, in summary, I release all written content on The Simple Dollar to the public domain. You can use and alter it in any way you choose without attribution or notice. Attribution to Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar, along with the site’s URL, is appreciated, however.

Lunacy or Genius

Not all that long ago I found a blogger that I think does an amazing job writing about her niche. She publishes a full daily feed without any copyright notice and having been thinking a lot about the concept of open source blogging and loving her work, I redistributed her feed, with all the links back and full credit. She got blazingly angry.

In communicating with her it became perfectly clear why the belief of holding on with force and vengeance to your online content is something to reconsider. Her desire to posses the content she created and freely distributed via RSS only limited her potential audience and the growth of her site.

Of course I immediately took down her feed when she asked, it was only up for an hour, but it still bothers me that because of her desire to retain ownership that she is unwilling to allow others to republish her work which will introduce more people to her and link them back to her site to help her grow.

When I republished her feed I thought I was doing her a favor as a fan, but that’s not how she saw it.

Commerce and Content

I’ve been online since 1994, and in internet years, that’s a lifetime almost. I’m sure if I went back and counted all the pages that I’ve written on the web it would be in the tens of thousands. I do just fine because of the web and in so many ways, I’ve been blessed. But I’ve been cursed as well.

In the early days I was tightfisted about my content and I got really, really angry when other people stole my content and used it. But it was those that used it without attribution that upset me the most. And I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it now but I even went so far as to pursue legal action against those folks and spent money, time and life energy policing and chasing them down.

The more content that I produced, the more time I had to spend looking over my shoulder to see who was using it and then having to deal with most unreasonable people in chasing them. That doesn’t even include all the money I spent in legal bills for content protection.

But what I gradually came to question was what was the point of all my tension and anger over the reuse of my work. For me one of the more pivotal moments was when I was standing in the server room among the racks of our servers and flipping through the server logs. I noticed that some porn site was pulling graphics from one of our sites and displaying it on theirs. I called Judy, our in house counsel, into the server room and said very tensely, “Look at this. What are we going to do about it?”

And then the bulb went off. OK, the porn site was stealing a graphic from our site, without permission but they were linking back to our financial site and it was resulting in traffic, free traffic, and traffic that we would not have had otherwise.

Judy and I discussed it for a minute and I decided, at that moment, that rather than pursue them I probably needed to send them a thank you note.

A graphic is not content but the argument could be made that creative work is creative work either beautifully drawn or beautifully written.

It Was At That Moment

It was at that moment that I decided to let go of my content, and while I did not make my position as publicly known as the cadre of bloggers I mentioned above, from that point forward I went after people less and less until today, when I don’t even bother.

In my next post I’m going to talk about what I learned from my pursuit experience and the logic behind not bothering, today.

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