Monday, April 23, 2007

lemonup and blog license

I have just updated my previous post about licenses and also explicitely licensed my blog. Previously I had used a Creative-Commons share-alike license for lecture notes to allow commercial use and had not specified what the license is for my blog apart from it being free for feeds (you may add it to a planet without seeking permission first).

Unfortunately the operators of a site named lemonup.com decided to mirror many of my blog posts with Google AdWords. The site provides no benefit to users that I can discover and merely takes away AdWords revenue from my site. It has no listed method of contacting the site owner so it seems that blogging about this and letting them read it on their own site is the only way of doing so. :-#

I'm happy for Technorati to mirror my site as they provide significant benefits to users and to me personally. I am also happy for planet installations that include my blog among others to have a Google advert on the page (in which case it's a Google advert for the entire planet not for my blog post).

Also at this time I permit sites to mirror extracts of my articles. So for example the porn blogs that post paragraphs of my posts about topics such as "meeting people" with links to my posts don't bother me. I'm sure that someone who is searching for porn will not be happy to get links to posts about Debian release parties etc - but that's their QA issue not a license issue. I am aware that in some jurisdictions I can not prevent people from using extracts of my posts - but I permit this even in jurisdictions where such use is not mandated by law.

Lemonup: you may post short extracts (10% or one paragraph) of my posts with links to the original posts, or you may mirror my posts with no advertising at all. If those options are not of interest to you then please remove all content I wrote from your site.

3 comments:

Mikal said...

Dude. They're spammers. They have no intention of stopping.

Anonymous said...

At least in the US (and probably in other countries that inherit British common law) fair use rules allow anyone to publish short extracts, quotes, summaries, or reviews of your blog, whether you like it or not.

Anonymous said...

Have you thought about a feed that doesn't include the whole post? Just the first lines or paragraphs? It's easy to do with wordpress: you just put a more tag between the teaser part and all the post. I have no idea about blogger. The main advantage would be that copyright infringers like that company can't technically take advantage of your posts and people interested in your posts will still go to your site, providing you with revenue.

anonymous: citation is not the same as completely copying a blog post. It's the same that applies to poems: a citation is a verse or a couple of verses, not the whole poem.