Creative Commons Explained

Today we got a nice email from one Todd Herbert.

I really, really love the redesign. I’m genuinely exited! I find your new category headings quite clever (once I got over the initial confusion).

I’ve been a KTB reader for quite some time now. I love the concept of the journal. I love everything about it. To be honest, my online magazine is definitely inspired by Killing the Buddha. I encourage you to check it out sometime at http://notaboutreligion.com.

One question: you mentioned that the content is a under creative commons license. Does that mean other websites can publish your articles (with attribution of course)?

Sorry about the confusion. And Not About Religion looks great! We definitely recommend checking it out. It’s on our links page now.

Todd’s Creative Commons question may come up for others, so it seems like it might be a good idea to answer it here. Before the redesign, you see, KtB content was all copyrighted. That means it was ours, all ours, and nobody else’s. Since much of what we publish is by authors trying to get their work out to as wide an audience as possible, being so possessive can actually be a disservice. Plus, since we don’t charge for the content anyway (or pay for it), what do we have to gain for keeping all this great material to ourselves?

Thanks to Creative Commons, we have more options available to us for licensing our content.

Under the CC license we chose, anybody is free to use and remix content that appears on this site. But in doing so, they have to say where it came from and include a link so that their users can see the content in its original form at KtB. After all, we got to it first, we made it available, and we want some love for that.

One catch, though: some of our articles are under regular copyright because of the author’s preference. In that case, there will be a copyright notice at the bottom of the article. Watch out for that.

Deal?