Copyright, etc.

I’ve been mucking around with the intellectual property notice in the sidebar for the last day or two, trying to get the right balance between maintaining my rights in the work I publish here and allowing people to redistribute some of it if they’re interested in doing so. The way I have it set up now is that my regular blog posts are covered by a Creative Commons license, the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license, which means that anyone can distribute the posts as long as they attribute Unfocused Me and theunfocusedlife.com, don’t change the post, and don’t charge for it. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to redistribute my blog posts, but I believe that at least some intellectual property ought to be freely distributable, and I sincerely doubt there is much economic value to me in retaining full copyright protection over these posts. My fiction, on the other hand, I intend to maintain full copyright in. I’m just getting back into writing fiction, but I’m writing it with an eye to eventual publication, and I don’t want to hurt my chances of getting something published by releasing the copyright here. I expect that over time, as I submit pieces for publication and they are rejected, I will decide that some stories have little or no chance of being accepted by a paying market, and that I will release those with a Creative Commons license as well.

Really, this is far more effort than I should be putting into this; it’s all time that I could have spent actually writing the novel or a real blog entry. I always thought copyright was an interesting area of the law, however, so now that I have the opportunity to tinker with it for my own work I really can’t resist.

In any event, I choose to be optimistic, and believe that it is at least possible that someone may want to copy and paste something I post here, so it’s better that I decide in advance the conditions under which I will let that happen.