[Sussex] Copyright/Copyleft...

[Steve Dobson]

Hi Matt

On 20 October 2003 at 13:02 Matthew Macdonald-Wallace 
> Quick question, I want to mark out the content on my website as mine,
> but I also want other people to be able to use it.  I guess I'm after a
> GPL for the written word/digtal documents instead of software.  I did a
> quick google on the GPL and Copyleft, but it doesn't seem to cover
> doumentation, just the source code and programs themselves.
> 
> Anyone got any ideas if something like this exists?

This is a common thing to do and I've seen it a number of times on websites.

Firstly anything you write you own the copyright on, even if you don't
place a copyright notices on the document.

RMS has come up with the Gnu Free Document License, but this is to cover 
documentation more than websites.  Also there is a big debate about at the
moment saying that this license is not "Free" as it includes more
restrictions on distribution and content modification that the GPL does.

There is nothing stopping you using the GPL if you want.  Debian, for
example,
consider everything on the CD/DVDs/Website as software.  I've even seen 
definitions of "software" that does include the documentation that accompany
the application.

Personally I would look about some of the "free sites" [1] then put
something
like this at the bottom of each page.

    <hr>
    <p>
      Copyright &copy; 2003; Matthew Macdonald-Wallace.  See
      <a href="//<your-site>/license/">license terms</a>.
    </p>

In the licensing terms you can then include details about how you want uses
to reference the text on your site.

Steve

[1]
http://www.kernel.org/legal.html
http://www.osdn.com/terms.shtml