creative commons

Copyright Criminals, which airs its documentaries on PBS, has an upcoming show on the rise of sampling in hip-hop music. While, the documentary focuses on copyright laws covering music it's not too difficult to apply lessons learned for other content including text found on web sites.

You may notice that I currently don't specify a copyright or Creative Commons license on my site. Where do I stand on the issue? I pretty much follow US Copyright laws which basically says using excerpts from an article is proper but it's illegal, outside of personal use, to copy a full article without permission. In the end though, it's not the law that I rely on but each persons own moral compass. That seems to work for me. It's only in rare cases that I've found people stealing entire articles without permission nor giving credit where credit is due.

Copyright Criminals - Trailer from IndiePix on Vimeo.

Story found via Creative Commons

I was just thinking the other day how nice it would be to find a list of places for free stock images that could be used to spice up things at my sites. Then comes along this article at Mashable, 26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog. I love it when things work out this way.

Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.

Please feel free to add your own list of legitimate sources of free multimedia in the comments form below.

"Tobias Schlitt "freaked out" today about PHP Freak's republishing of his blog feed. He publicly withdraws his implicit permission for PHP Freaks to republish content from his feeds. This is an interesting area of law. Eric Goldman has an rundown of the issues. In my mind, there's no question that a blogger grants an implied..."

Complete Story