There are a few interesting elements to this entire
discussion -- some technical, some social. In no
particular order:
1. The manner in which this has been handled has
effectively turned something that could have been seen
as supporting the community into something that, to
some people, has been taken as an affront to the
community. This is unfortunate, and avoidable, and
largely a fait accompli.
2. In your post at
http://tidewatermusings.peterstinson.com/2008/02/do-people-really-realize-what-creative.html,
you say: "I'd turned the feed off, but I couldn't turn
off the posting to the blog without giving away the
farm."
What "farm" are you referring to? There are a slew of
ways to automate posting to a blog via email, and with
a minimum of technical proficiency you could have
interrupted the posting to the blog -- or, if you were
using any one of the freely available open source
tools you could have kept aggregating the posts, but
have set them to unpublished. This would have allowed
you to engage in a dialogue that would have allowed
for a more amenable resolution.
3. I thought of trying to find a gentler way of saying
this, but after a few hours of intermittent
cogitation, nothing really came to mind. Your
technical implementation is hamfisted at best. You
should have taken steps to, at least, obfuscate email
addresses. Using a tool like Drupal, you could have
installed the Mail module, the FeedAPI, and the
Invisimail module. In your current implementation, you
have exposed all members posting to the list to
increased exposure to spambots and email harvesters.
All of our spam filters thank you.
4. Read the terms of the CC-NC-SA-Attribution license
at
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode.
Pay particular attention to section 4d, which includes
the following language: "(iii) to the extent
reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor
specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such
URI does not refer to the copyright notice or
licensing information for the Work;"
So, under this clause, I *could* post to the list that
any re-use of my work outside the context of this list
must contain a link back to this page:
http://www.funnymonkey.com/copyright-information -- of
my web site -- I'm not going to do this, but it is
within my legal rights. As the original creator of my
emails, I retain full copyright; and the terms of the
CC license allow me -- and all other list contributors
-- the right to specify how my work is attributed.
Each individual licensor can specify a different
method of attribution. It is the responsibility of
people re-publishing the content to make sure that
these rights are respected, and that the stipulations
of the licensors are followed.
For what it's worth, I think publishing the posts to a
more accessible medium is a great idea. If you take
the time to read through some of my posts on my
professional blog, you'll get a pretty clear sense of
where I stand on these issues. This situation,
however, could have been handled better -- and it's
too bad. What could have been seen as a service to the
community seems to feel -- to some people, anyways --
as a breach of trust.
Just because you can do something doesn't necessarily
mean you should.
Cheers,
Bill
--- Peter Stinson <pastinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've received a couple of emails off-line and have
> seen at least one
> posted response to my missive from earlier. I
> thought I'd respond to
> the online post.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
