Open Source Blogging

“Please Steal My Content”

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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