You see these words everywhere, you know what they mean, but do you really care? When you start a new website this line is always on your footer design, proving to anyone the content in this website cannot be copied or terrible consequences will ensue.
The World Wide Web is the most open platform ever done, you can copy text, images, css, html, javascript, with a simple command or right click. We live with a platform that makes it really easy to copy and take whatever you want. This is why resources should be as open as it’s platform, and this is why Position Absolute is my first website to not have those words. It means you can use, copy, clone whatever you want. I prefer to live with an accessible platform than a restrictive one, and I don’t say that I would like you to clone my content, I would much prefer you link to my website, but I will not stop you either. Those 2 words are for me a lost of bytes on every site I visit, my precious iPhone bandwidth.
No one wants to have their work stolen, but the mighty wrath of those 2 words will not change anything to the result, if someone want to copy your work he will, no right click JavaScript hi-jack will stop him.
I learned in school to never forget those 2 words, but the only thing they’re doing is reassure my clients that no one will copy the information on their website. And how could they, you have copyrights! Surprisingly it works admirably on most of them, but if they have the unfortunate luck to find a website that stops the mouse right click, an hour long conversation about how right click hi-jack does not stop anyone from taking your content is necessary.
Of course I understand that artists do not want their work to be used without being paid, there is a lot of stories about artists who had their work used in the ad market without getting a penny. In a way this is a risk you take when you decide to put your work on the net, this is a kind of unfortunate trade off you take to get more people to know you. In a perfect world, these situations would not happen, but that’s certainly not the “copyright © 2007″ in your footer that will stop anyone from stealing it.
While I’m not against copyright, I wanted to expose the fact that most of the time we just put them there mindlessly.
“Position Absolute is my first website to not have those words. It means you can use, copy, clone whatever you want. ”
Are you sure about that? It isn’t the presence of “copyright (c)” that creates the copyright, nor that restricts anyone’s entitlement to legitimately copy or create derivative works. If you mean to put your work in the public domain I think you do need to explicitly say that (or use a Creative Commons license, which gets its power from the fact that you do own the copyright, unless you give it away or sell it).
I think, your are right, the way I turned this line was a bit too much, I wanted to put emphasis on the fact that you could use this website content for what ever you want, not put emphasis on the fact that the reason you can do this is because I have no copyright.
I kinda agree, I never stopped to think about this, that said I will not stop putting them there
Why not use a Creative Commons license to be even clearer about your intention of allowing users do whatever with your content? That’s why CC was created.
http://creativecommons.org/faq
Keith is correct. It’s an intrinsic right and it is not necessary to explicitly state it. ‘copyright ©’ is also wrong since ‘©’ is short for the word copyright, as is ‘(c)’. Only one of ‘copyright’, ‘©’ or ‘(c)’ should be used.
To me, the “copyright” text is often useless simply because the owning entity doesn’t and won’t opt to pour resources into investigating and enforcing the copyright. The copyright is essentially toothless. This is why it matters for the FSF to take legal action against GPL violators; as a copyright license, if the GPL’s terms are never enforced, it may as well not exist.
@Michael: Thank you for the link, I will put the site under the licence
I mostly agree with you, especially the part about mindlessly setting it in your footer. I constantly think about putting one whenever I remember to put a footer on a site, and sometimes the footer is just that, the false copyright.
When I put one on my site though, what I mean is for people to link to my work and use it appropriately, and obviously not stealing something and saying you made/wrote it. It doesn’t stop some people though, I found so many people stealing pieces of texts and even my terms where they just replaced my site name which they gave a billion excuses for. Seriously, how low can someone go?
Even though it won’t stop people, it’s still a good idea to put one as a “warning” or disclaimer that people shouldn’t copy your content.
I don’t agree with you. A simple example: My company spends a lot of money to a lawyer for making our terms of conditions and legal agreements. A competitor copy & paste it into their page, without paying for it. That’s not what the internet stands for.