Sarah Parez: Over the weekend, it seemed that everyone in the tech blogosphere contributed to the discussion around fractured blog comments; Robert Scoble even went so far as to say that the "era of blogger's control" is over. What all these discussions hinged on was whether or not a web service called Shyftr had the right to appropriate bloggers' RSS feeds and build their brand around our content (a practice they've now modified due to this outcry).

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"I and many WordPress “representatives”, along with the developers and staff of WordPress and Automattic,
are getting more and more complaints and requests for help dealing with
content theft issues. We all need to clear this up and spread the word
about how this works in relationship to WordPress."

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"No matter where you are in the world, we invite you to celebrate CC’s
five years of helping to keep culture free and celebrate the future of
participatory culture."

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"Grabbing content through your blog’s feed and inserting or replacing synonyms in the content,
typically keywords the splogger needs to get the page ranking and
search terms to attract attention, has been around for a long time.
However, this form of conversion is dramatically different. The words don’t translate into recognizable search terms."

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"Five years ago this December, we launched Creative Commons...We have taken the insight of the Free Software Movement, and made it real in the space of culture, science and education. There is now a language to signal the freedoms creators support, and a set of legal and technical tools to make those freedom stick."

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The crux of the problem is that non-software artwork like the examples above occupies a strange niche inside free software applications and operating systems. They are not code, but they are tightly integrated into the system. Artists frequently create them as standalone works, but they are also -- by necessity -- bundled into software packages and distributions, many of which are under the FSF's General Public License (GPL)."

"Corporations today deal with an incredible number of contractual relationships. However, copyright issues and the assignment of rights are often neglected when using outside firms to create graphic design work, advertising, or to handle web development. While many top level executives understand the value of the intellectual property and copyrightable material they may create – and they work furiously to protect it – these same corporate leaders often forget to ensure that work done for their firm can then be legally used as their own."

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"When we launched version 3.0 of the CC licenses February 23 we also switched on a number of graphical, language, and technical updates. This is the first of a very tardy series of posts about those updates."

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