Creative Commons licensing

[ses5909]

Aaron Wall recently made his blog available (http://www.seobook.com/seo-book-blog-now-creative-commons-licensed) under the creative Commons license.

Would you ever consider doing this? What do you think the pros and cons might be? Obviously duplicate content would be a concern of mine.

[davemcnally]

I wouldn't consider doing this personally as my content is not all within one niche. If I focused on one topic and was popular with it, I may consider it.

The duplicate content could be looked upon as a pro or a con. People will be taking his content and probably listing it as their own but many people are likely to link back to him.

Licensing his content in this way must also be providing more traffic from people looking for this sort of thing. I don't know of many places that will allow you to take content in that way.

[Fred Sanford]

Although he made officially made his blog available under the CC license, aren't we all unofficially practicing the same thing he is?

From what I've observed from most bloggers, as long as you give proper credit and link back to them won't mind you using their work 9 times out of 10.

[tetsujin]

Yeah, I think the CC pretty much just ensures it. I am tempted to do it but I have no idea what people would use my content for...

Cameron

[Dan Schulz]

I'm of the opinion that if you really want to give something away, just give it away for crying out loud!

[jMcQuarrie]

My blog is licensed under an "Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license"

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

[ses5909]

So that means, as long as you give credit and don't profit off of your content, it's free to use without prior permission?

[jMcQuarrie]

Pretty much yep.

[martyn11post]

I love it when I see the creative commons logo, because I can then find out what content i can use and whether I need to reference back.
A lot of wikipedia content is covered by this or the GNU free licence I believe.

Also images on flikr are sometimes covered by this licence. Useful if you are looking for images for your blog.

[samwoodfin]

I'm inclined to agree with Dan. And in terms of licenses, I'm much more comfortable using something (themes, for example) with a GPL license than a CC license. If I wanted to give something away, I'd either use GPL, or just say "Hey, you can use this however you want."

In the end, though, I just don't see this as a good idea, in terms of most blog content.

[Michael Martin]

It's interesting on the duplicate content issue. There's been a bit of talk lately about search engines giving credit to the sites that post a story first.

Maybe the timeline extends to duplicate content as well?

I mean, the dup content thing was originally about similar pages on the same domain. This would be similar content on different domains, and the SEs are going to see it on Aaron's blog first (As it's so big!), so perhaps they will see the other blogs as splogs, and penalise them, not Aaron?


I'm not sure if I'd do it though. It might be a little easier though. I hate it when other sites just translate my articles and assume that's okay. CC would make it legal at least, and I'd stop being annoyed I imagine. xD