Uncopyright
zenhabits.net
zenhabits.net
Why not use a public license like CC0 or CC? It'll accomplish the same thing and is widely recognized as valid.
If anything, I believe the author's very right of placing a (recent) work in the public domain is what is debated. Which... to me is beyond unfair and absurd, but may very well be "the law"...
An interesting example appears in SQLite's copyright page [1]. They acknowledge that, even though the code has been placed in the public domain, some legal teams may advise their companies to purchase a license.
This is very interesting. Can someone here please elaborate on it?
programname: Brief description of program
Written by My Name <my@email>, 2013
This software and associated documentation files (the "Software") is
released under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication, version 1.0, as
published by Creative Commons. To the extent possible under law, the
author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring
rights to the Software to the public domain worldwide. The Software is
distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
If you did not receive a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication
along with the Software, see
<http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>
Even if this crazy bit of non-license were interpreted as a license, all you are doing is claiming that you are releasing copyright rights. You are not releasing patent rights. So by using your code, I'm opening myself up to you suing me for patent violation. Furthermore, "to the extent permitted by law" could mean, depending on the jurisdiction, as "not". You've put the onus on me to determine whether your goofy pseudolicense is legal or not.
I think CC0 is very wrong for code. I don't understand why people are so against a decent academic license in lieu of a murky public domain declaration of questionable legality and no patent release.
It's carefully written to address your concern about "to the extent permitted by law", including a public license fallback:
> 3. Public License Fallback. Should any part of the Waiver for any reason be judged legally invalid or ineffective under applicable law, then the Waiver shall be preserved to the maximum extent permitted taking into account Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose. In addition, to the extent the Waiver is so judged Affirmer hereby grants to each affected person a royalty-free, non transferable, non sublicensable, non exclusive, irrevocable and unconditional license to exercise Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "License").
tl;dr: It degrades to the MIT license but without the attribution requirement.
True, there is no patent license, but neither the MIT or BSD licenses nor the GPL before v3 have a patent grant either. You'd be slagging off projects from jQuery to Linux (GPLv2) to LLVM if you demand an explicit patent grant for everything you use.
I do find it worrisome that there'd be this much fear of the CC0 dedication, even if unfounded. Could my statement be rewritten to make it more clear?
Principle. I'm one of those nutters that hates all form of copyright becuase blah blah blah, information purity, I'll skip the lecture, though. We just don't want information we create to be distributed under terms at all, that it could just out there to be used as people will without needing to worry about the consumption of information the same way they have no concern using or consuming a hamburger and plate.
Your problem is with software patents. A dubious at best, outright unethical at worst practice that has hampered creative development in the last decades. A trend that would have made the development of a myriad of platforms from editors, languages and complete operating systems impossible in the past. It's misdirected frustration.
Case in point: Your refusal to use code based on its own merits.
Surely every license is, by definition, "to the extent permitted by law"? No court will ever interpret a license to be valid beyond the extent permitted by law.
Such serious claim requires some serious citation. It is certainly not true as stated, since all original works produced by the government are in the public domain regardless of when they were created (e.g., NASA images and many US coins designs.) The first Google result for [public domain existence debate] is your comment. I haven't come across any evidence that any such debate exists, and plenty of sources to support the fact of the existence of public domain (some given by others in this thread.)
As I see it, he's trying to remove himself from the concept of copyright entirely, so adding a license is against the entire point. Especially when that license effectively says there is no license, that seems like a caricature of exactly what he doesn't like.
I share a similar view, it feels very "clean" and refreshing. Put the content out there, let people use it how they want, end of story. Obviously, though, it's not practical for all use cases currently.
See: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
Part 1: This talks about what copyright means. Given there is no universal definition, this clarifies exactly what is being given away.
Part 2: This is worth quoting.
. To the greatest extent permitted by, but not in contravention of, applicable law, Affirmer hereby overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally waives, abandons, and surrenders all of Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights and associated claims and causes of action, whether now known or unknown (including existing as well as future claims and causes of action), in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "Waiver").
Notice how this is unambiguous, and takes into account many different cases. Compare that the the blog post:
There is no need to email me for permission — use my content however you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or without credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK.
First of all, what does use mean? Does that mean I can share it with others, and they have the same right to it? And is he allowed to take it back?
What happens if he decides he does not want to have people giving away his books anymore? He's not said that he can't change it in the future. CC0 explicitly says it last for as long as legally permissible.
Furthermore, what about in countries like Germany, where you can't actually give up your copyright? CC0 has a fallback (part 3) that essentially says "if I can't give up my rights to this, this is the license I am releasing it under", then provides a license with no restrictions.
I've been packaging software for Debian recently, and dealing with copyright stuff. When you start distributing data internationally for a large organization, you really want to make sure all of your ducks are in a row.
"If people buy my ebook and then distribute it to 20 people, and each of those distributes it to 20 more, and those to 20 more … I’ve lost $76,000 in ebook revenues. Perhaps. That’s if you agree with the assumption that all those people would have bought the ebook if it hadn’t been freely distributed. I don’t buy that. In this example, thousands of people are reading my work (and learning about Zen Habits) who wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s good for any content creator. Also: I’ve made more money since releasing copyright, by far, than when I had copyright." -From the page.
Love his viewpoint about copyright and piracy.
That’s good for any content creator
If you love and agree with his view point, great, but so many people agree with him and then take it as far as "well this content creator is okay with it, so all content creators should be!".
Absolutely! Up and until they decide to relinquish it by selling a copy to someone. Then that person should have control over his or her copy.
Sure, they bought it, it's theirs. That question makes as much sense as asking if car owners should be able to give lifts with his own car.
you've effectively eliminated the creator's control over their work
No, the creator did that by relinquishing part of his work to other(s).
I think that most copyright owners are interested in restricting the making of copies because selling copies is a source of revenue for them. Revenue with which they buy food, and clothes, and housing, and cars.
When food and clothes and housing and cars are all able to be freely copied just like music recordings and books and movies are, then the makers of media would likely be less interested in making sure they get paid for their work. If they need a new car, they can just copy one, for free.
2.1 Rights Granted. Upon payment for Music Content, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Music Content only for your personal, non-commercial, entertainment use, subject to the Agreement.
2.2 Restrictions. You must comply with all applicable copyright and other laws in your use of the Music Content. Except as set forth in Section 2.1 above, you may not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, license or otherwise transfer or use the Music Content. We do not grant you any synchronization, public performance, promotional use, commercial sale, resale, reproduction or distribution rights for the Music Content. As required by our Music Content providers, Music Content is available only to customers located in the United States.
If you want to demonstrate that non-colluding third-party beneficiaries can be sued for the breach of contract of a second party, be my guest, though (I honestly don't know).
Many content creators put off users with their stupid DRM implementations. I remember buying a game for some $34 in 2008. But that game had 5 copy limit. Now I am what you can call a "regular formatter". Formatted PC twice, changed laptop and now I do not own license to that game.
Let user make copies, but trust that they won't copy them further.
On the surface, I cannot think of a good reason why that should not also be able to be applied to the sale of software.
My own opinion is that copyright decreases total utility/well-being of society, and I disagree with the claim that copyright is required to create works of art/media. For more detailed argument why copyright is not needed I recommend the book Against Intellectual Monopoly.
That doesn't mean there are not improvements to be made to its application in practice, or that copyright justifies the use of any number of unethical tools (like DRM).
If someone wants to sell for $1000, I am in. But if some middleman wants to sell it for $1000 and give $10 to creator plus restrict me from using the content the way I want, I hate that!
Despite the rise of the Internet, a bunch of new artists who were probably in diapers when Napster came out continue to sign up with those middlemen.
Why? That is not a right in the US the same way that free religious expression is a right. Copyright was left to Congress to define however they liked, later shaped by corporate interests and international agreements.
Regarding the morality of copyright: music, movies, books and so on are all part of our culture, and I find it reprehensible that you want to limit the sharing of our culture for 100 years at a time [1].
[1] Current copyright terms in the US are mostly life of the creator + 70 years, or 95 years for corporate works. 100 years is a conservative average.
If someone wants to charge you a thousand bucks to watch the movie they've created it is their right to do so.
That said, I can't sleep in, eat, or drive good feels, so I'd like to derive benefit from what I create, at least while I'm alive. Unless a post-scarcity world happens in my lifetime, in which case I'll offer up all my work with minimal restrictions.
Of course, the difference between these two options is that one requires a massive government bureaucracy and potentially millions of dollars of money and time spent in court.
I think a lot of content owners are aware of piracy, copyright infringement and its benefits. The Game of Thrones director(?) was talking about the benefits of piracy recently.
A lot of content owners don't enforce their copyright, don't send out the hounds and I think a lot of content owners actually benefit from this. I have seen software creators detect pirated installs and instead of shutting them down talk about their small studio and ask when you have the money to buy the software. For some companies this is far more effective than adding a kill switch. For others it really isn't.
Just because someone downloads a game from a torrent site doesn't mean they won't buy the full copy.
Why would people pay for content that is freely available? Pretty much all content nowadays can be downloaded freely, that doesn't mean there's no business around the production of such content. People still pay money to consume media. It doesn't matter why people do it, if one can show empirically that people pay for content.
For example, I can download Cory Doctorow's books freely, but I choose to pay for the books. It doesn't matter why I do it, it just matters that I do. Just like thousands of other readers.
There used to be a website where you could buy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (without the trademarks) for a lot of smaller price than the official version. That business didn't lasted long.
A lot of people like to pay for a service. They want to pay for Spotify, for example. It's a good service and it's priced correctly. Significant portion of Spotify users could download the music using P2P networks, but they kinda like the service that they're provided. The same applies to Steam, and Amazon's ebook store and so on.
Is it more difficult to create a business without copyright protection? Probably yes. Is it impossible? Certainly not.
Copyright is a monopoly which grants exclusive right to make copies. Monopolies should always be balanced to benefit the public, not corporations who are trying to make a profit.
It's pretty clear that current copyright law is too strict. The duration should be reduced to 5-10 years (which according to studies is the timeframe to bring in 90% of the profit for the work of art). I personally don't see a case for copyright laws at all, but we should start with 5-10 years.
I'm not sure what you mean? CentOS and Scientific Linux, the two main RHEL clones, are doing fine, as is RHEL itself.
>For example, Red Hat is a company that sold a modified and customized Linux system with easy installation and many other useful features. Although the underlying Linux system is obtained by Red Hat for free, the customization and testing conducted by Red Hat is costly. Using prices quoted on the Internet on July 10, 2002, Red Hat charged $59.95 for a package containing its system. Because it is based on the underlying Linux system, Red Hat must also make available its code to competitors.
>As a result, anyone who wishes to can sell their own “Red Hat” system. And, in fact, there were at least two companies, Hcidesign and Linuxemporium, that did exactly this. For example, on July 10, 2002, Hcidesign offered for sale Red Hat Linux 7.2 for a price of $16.00, about 1/3rd of the price charged by Red Hat. Linuxemporium.co.uk offered a similar deal.
>So how does Red Hat stay in business? For starters, it turns out that Red Hat sold many more $59.95 packages than Hcidesign and Linuxemporium sold $16.00 packages. Moreover Red Hat is a large well known company, while no one has ever heard of the other two, nor does it appear that they ever represented a dangerous market threat to Red Hat.
>How could this be? Or more accurately, how could this not be? Have you ever used software that worked properly? If you had a problem with software you bought, and had to call the seller for advice – who would you prefer to call – the people who wrote the program, or the people who copied it?
>The story is not over yet, please bear with us. Taking years in writing a book chapter is not a proof of high productivity, but there is a silver lining. On December 24, 2006, we went back to the Internet to see what happened to these three companies. All three of them still exist, and many other have joined the game.
>After years of having all its innovations mercilessly “pirated” Red Hat is still the market leader, has a world wide web of offices, sells lots of Linux-based software products while also giving away lots of others for free and its revenues are soaring. Hcidesign, in spite the advantage of being a legal pirate does not seem to have done very well; it is still there, but it is selling very few products and all Linux-based products are now off its shelves.
>Linuxemporium had a more interesting life. After either changing its name to or been acquired by ChyGwyn, it is back in business under the original name and it is thriving. Indeed, it has pioneered an entire new line of business: it sells at positive prices software that is downloadable for free from the original companies, by claiming it sells “high class software for the cognoscenti”. The power and creativity of competitive markets sometimes surprise even us!
>If you had a problem with software you bought, and had to call the seller for advice – who would you prefer to call – the people who wrote the program, or the people who copied it?
And this sentence is particularly misleading. It kinda implies that RH wrote RHEL entirely, or that the authors of the software would be the best point of contact. Both are demonstrably false. Only a part of RHEL is written by RH employees, and one reason why people are paying RH is so that they do not need to interact with upstream developers (ie "the people who wrote the program"). LKML can be fairly abrasive experience.
As I understand it, he is selling some products, and uncopyrighted some others for marketing purposes. Interestingly, some people will pay also for those works which are uncopyrighted. Still, it isn't the case that everything he offers is free and can be paid only voluntarily.
For more niche books with only a small and professional audience i dont think it would work.
authors are the tip of the spear because the blogosphere works so well in the current internet, but the rest are following
In comparison you can't build alternative copyright policies with "weak copyright" because there is no control. Instead a general policy is forced on all work.
I believe that choice is good, and that is why I am pro-copyright. You are free to relinquish control over your work, but allow me to make my own choices on my work.
Most people have no problem with private property, but it is in a way more of an imposition on the public than copyright. If you own a plot of land on Manhattan, you didn't create that land. It was there before you existed. You didn't fight to take that land from the natives. Your ancestors did that. You can tell people who want to live on your land to find their own, but there is only so much of it to go around.
None of these justifications for regulating private property are applicable to creative works. If I write a program, I created it. It didn't exist before. At the same time, if I tell someone else to go write their own program instead of using mine, there is an infinite variety of programs that exist that they could write and call their own. They don't have to move out to Long Island, so to speak, to stake out their own little plot.
Personally, I don't see a lot of rich artists, designers, musicians, inventors, scientists. But, I sure do see a lot of rich lawyers and business people.
> 4. What if someone publishes a book with all your content and makes a million dollars off it? I hope they at least give me credit. And my deepest desire is that they give some of that money to a good cause.
I don't believe him, and even if he thinks this way, he is the minority. Do you know the story about the bum who killed himself after seeing someone getting rich and famous from the song HE was playing in the streets? (my way)
> Do you know the story about the bum who killed himself after seeing someone getting rich and famous from the song HE was playing in the streets? (my way)
I don't know this story, but issues around homelessness includes (lack of) visibility of the work homeless folks produce, so it wouldn't surprise me if such a story existed. Also, please don't call homeless people bums, it is really insulting.
Please, tell the story.
You are probably right that no one likes to see their work dragged through the mud, or have someone else get credit for it, or whatever the situation may be, but he is clearly stating he will take the good with the bad, because it is all worth it.
You can’t steal what is given freely.
If someone can make a million dollars off of something that is essentially free, that person must be adding something significant in value, otherwise economics just doesn't work that way. Does it?
I mean, you don't have to mark stuff as "copyright", and you don't have to register it, it's automatically copyrighted as soon as it's fixed in tangible form. At least since 1976 the USA has worked that way. So why should some carefully, but not legally, worded notice allow you to give up those rights? Can anyone point to definitive information about this?
On the other hand I believe an officially registered copyright is required to merely go to court about a case, so if he says he's uncopyrighted everything, then turns evil, registers a copyright, and starts suing, I imagine that wouldn't really stand up so well to a judge in court.
Really though I find the entire concept of copyright and intellectual "property" to be pretty ridiculous and baffling so maybe my interpretation is wrong.
No, you can go to court about unregistered copyrights. The distinction is with registration, you can sue for statutory damages, instead of actual damages, and that's where the real money is.
But again, I Am Not A Lawyer, and we always let lawyers speak about these things at hundreds of dollars an hour, so you just have mis-information until you pay someone to bring your particular case to trial.
"Please don’t take the 0 (zero) in the name “CC0” literally – no legal instrument can ever eliminate all copyright interests in a work in every jurisdiction.
CC0 doesn’t affect two very important categories of copyright and related rights. First, just like our licenses, CC0 does not affect other persons’s rights in the work or in how it is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. Second, the laws of some jurisdictions don’t allow authors and copyright owners to waive all of their own rights, such as moral rights. When the waiver doesn’t work for any reason CC0 acts as a free public license replicating much of intended effect of the waiver, although sometimes even licensing those rights isn’t effective. It varies jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
While we can't be certain that all copyright and related rights will indeed be surrendered everywhere, we are confident that CC0 lets you sever the legal ties between you and your work to the greatest extent legally permissible."
[1] See https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/. Incidentally, this license was developed by a US non-profit, so it's reasonable to expect them to have paid special attention to it working with the US copyright law.
All works are automatically copyrighted when they are set down so you can't somehow avoid it or opt out. There's just no mechanism. So view a "dedication to the public domain" as what it is, an "irrevocable" license (which means "permission" not "contract") to the entire universe to use the covered works in any way without permission. While this license exists, if the author tries to sue anyone the defendant merely needs to wave around the license. This is as good as the public domain, right?
Nope. An author can always revoke a license that purports to be irrevocable after a set time. This is known as copyright "termination" or reversion. The law is very, very clear on this. There is nothing that an author can do, no agreement that he can make, that waives this right. You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway.
The purpose of this is to protect authors against signing their lives away when they are young and lack leverage. One effect however is to make all transfers and licenses contingent which in turn makes it impossible to actually dedicate things to the public domain in as real a sense as one would like.
In the US, authors absolutely can give up their rights to a work irrevocably. For example, Michael Jackson did not own all of the copyrights to his songs on his death even though he wrote or co-wrote all of them. Movieland is filled with examples of screenwriters who gave up their rights to their (non-commissioned, i.e., non-work-for-hire scripts, aka "spec" scripts) screenplay in exchange for a one-time payment only to see the studio get rich.
You've mixed up US copyright law, which allows for complete inalienability during the author's lifetime and European copyright law's concept of "moral rights" which are not alienable but the other or others.
An author's heirs can reclaim any rights that are transferred. See, for instance this: http://www.authorsguild.org/services/legal-services/terminat...
"What if the author is dead? When an author dies, his or her termination right, known as the “termination interest” is inherited as follows:
if the author has no children, the surviving spouse inherits the author’s entire termination interest; if the author has children, they split the termination interest with the surviving spouse — the children take half, divided equally among them, and the surviving spouse takes half; if the author has children but no surviving spouse, then the children inherit the author’s entire termination interest (divided equally among them); if any of the author’s children is dead, that child’s interest is inherited by his or her own children (divided equally among them); majority action by the children of the author’s deceased child is required to exercise that child’s termination interest; if the author’s surviving spouse, children, and grandchildren are all dead, the author’s executor, administrator, personal representative, or trustee owns the author’s entire termination interest. The author’s heirs (as listed above), or their executors, who own and are entitled to exercise more than one half of the termination interest, either individually or together, may terminate."
And in other comments, I addressed the works-for-hire issue, where the creator never owns the copyright to begin with. You can't terminate works-for-hire because legally the person who hired you is always already the author.
Does that only hold for authors? Because tons of musicians and music bands have "signed their lives away" when they were young and they haven't got anything back.
Plus, how would this would work: "You can pay an author a billion dollars to take ownership of a work and set it all down in an ironclad 50-page contract she can just go ahead and take it back anyway."
Is the author then supposed to return the money? And what about all the damages to your business by getting the ownership of his work back?
The termination is far enough in the future that only now are some prominent musicians taking advantage of it, but there have been some stories recently. You have to actively take advantage of the law, also, it's not automatic. And there are often lawsuits.
None of this applies to "works made for hire," for which the "author" is for example a company. If I hire you to write a song you never were the copyright owner to begin with. This is a complex area and there's a lot of litigation about the distinction between works for hire and works that are written and then transferred or licensed.
I don't know the details of how it works with canceling my hypothetical "no termination only" billion dollar contract. I know copyright law but I haven't studied this area specifically. For the most part contracts pay the author a modest sum that covers a license or a transfer for a modest number of years. In fact a 20 year license should cost about as much as a perpetual license given that most works make all the money they're ever going to make long before that. So a termination under those circumstances doesn't involve any unjust enrichment to the author. And there can be no legally relevant "damages" that result from an author taking advantage of a law that has been in place for decades--it's your responsibility as a media company to know about these things, not the job of an author to decline to take advantage of his legal rights for your sake.
What if I create a legal entity, have it hire me to make a work, and then dissolve the entity? (That's mostly rhetorical; I expect the answer, if it exists, is messy.)
EDIT: answering my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works
But if I write an article and then sell all the rights to the Times later, I can claw it back in a few decades.
The arguments are over what happens when it's not so clear. Like what if the Times contracts with an independent freelancer specifically to write an article?
I confess that the very concept of "copyright" becomes more and more slippery the more you look into it. And the slipperiness is all to the benefit of the rich and powerful, and to copyright lawyers, of course.
In the history of mankind, the concept of copyright has never been more coherent than it is now.
In the Middle Ages and before, copyright to the extent it existed was by fiat of the crown. Frequently, the crown (especially during the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan eras) would use copyright and patent rights as political favors, transferring them at the whim of the current monarch.
Prior to the 1900s, copyright law differed in every nation. Books copyrighted in Europe, for example, were not copyrighted in the US, and vice versa. The Berne Convention standardized copyright law worldwide.
And note, Disney notwithstanding, the current craziness about indefinite copyrights and inalienable copyrights is a result of European artists' efforts to create an eternal copyright (see, e.g., "moral rights"). Corporations have very little to do with that effort and most are opposed to long-term copyrights since most copyrightable IP is generally not worth much and the costs of complying with old copyrights is extremely burdensome.
(Corporations much prefer trademark law, which is indefinite but only as long as the trademark remains in active use. Trademarks are far more valuable because they are not limited to a single fixed expression.)
You can, just look at the license. If one is missing, assume it's copyrighted.
> I have to put in the effort to track down the original source, and see what notes he/she/it/them put on the original, and if the creator wrote "released into public domain" you can go ahead and use it?
Yes? I don't see what's wrong with that, asking the author if you can use his work is just good etiquette, I'm sorry if that's too much work for you.
Yes, it is too much work; it's often not even possible. This is the problem of orphaned works, where the authors are gone or missing and nobody knows who they are, etc, or the work was published anonymously, etc.
Tracing down the authors of works produced seventy or eighty years ago is actually really difficult. You should try it sometime before casually dismissing the concern as being born of laziness.
whether this one was that one... or that one was this one
or which one was what one... or what one was who
licensed this day in August, nineteen sixty-two.
This is why the public domain does very much exist. Even though the author may have placed his work into the public domain, so that anyone can copy it freely, he still remains the author and another person can not copyright his text without his permission. Just as nobody can copyright the works of Shakespeare.
This is why it is important to make a distinction between a natural concept of authorship on one hand, and the unnatural and confusing commercial constructs of 'IP rights' on the other hand. As Richard Stallman correctly says, there is no such thing as 'IP rights' because nobody can even define them. There is just a bunch of different monopoly licences. Monopolies, on the whole, are a bad thing.
I went to Leo to inquire about permission to use that list for the site and was pleasantly surprised by that uncopyright policy. I am a big big fan of Leo Babauta and I think there a lot to learn from him (at least I do pretty often).
Thanks again great dude!
As he puts it, he gives away 98% of his stuff free[0], but charges premium prices for his premium product. The money compensates him for the money (and risk) he put into developing the premium product. [1]
[0]: As in beer.
[1]: I can only assume at some point that would filter back down to his free offerings and voila! New material!
Am I right in thinking that this is forbidden by other laws than copyright law?
If he's full-on rejecting copyright then I can (with his blessing) take his entire body of work, s/zenhabits/choult/ and profit.
I'm not sure that the author counters/confronts that concept enough for me to accept that that is something he would acquiesce to.
Cool, so I can clone and automatically scrape your blog, copy to other blog site with about page names altered, but I'll keep your picture, just change the name? Then I'll put advertising on it, build up a following then sell the whole site? Thanks!