Techgoondu is off Creative Commons
By:
23 Feb
2009
2 Comments
 

We hate to eat our own words.

Unfortunately, in this case, we have to. Techgoondu is off creative commons, an initiative I pushed for a few months back.

Even though many of us here at Techgoondu champion creative commons, after talking to some lawyer friends we realized that we can’t follow it to the letter.

In spirit, everything I wrote remains true — I believe that some forms of content should be free, and many of the Techgoondu posters do as well.

However, in practice, with content mashed-up from sites and vendors (e.g. photos of mobile phones, etc.) that are not under creative commons, we can’t offer our content under this license.

Legally, it exposes us to the liability of being sued even though we’re not for profit. Seeing that it is exceedingly difficult to run a chapalang tech news blog site with the freshest, kookiest stories for our readers with a blanket creative commons restriction, we have decided not to run with it.

Even though we could offer our analysis and stories for free re-distribution, without pictures and other content we take from others, we’re doing a disfavour to our readers. Apologies to all creative commons fans out there.

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Tagged in: Media, Singapore, techgoondu,  
 
  • Chi-Loong

    In a sense you are correct. CC and non–CC content are mutually exclusive.

    From what I understand from our lawyer friends, CC means that your content is free for redistribution, mash-up and re-use.

    Now the main problem is that much of our content — esp. when it comes to product shots and pictures that we put up — is not CC compliant. The vendor companies might let us use their product photos but that doesn’t mean that they allow their photos to be used or tampered by others via our
    website (which CC implies).

    I think it’s semantic legalese and very unlikely anything will happen, but I have to concur with the group that it adds unnecessary complication.

    I think your workaround solution is possible — label some parts as CC and others as not. However, this needs to be applied to every article and the content looked at — a pain in terms of formatting in practice. It’s difficult when there are many different writers contributing.

    Thus, in view of practical implementation, we put it to a vote and it was suggested that the site CC label be taken down.

  • Henry

    I am trying to understand what is creative commons. So, pardon my summary if it is wrong.

    Does it mean CC and non-CC content are mutually exclusive?

    Can you like label the vendor images non-CC?