It's Eric Woodward (dotcom)

For the past few years, I’ve been releasing content under various licenses, usually linking to the “official” website for each one. But starting today, I’m looking towards the future, as I’ve finally added web-friendly versions of several of these licenses to this very website.

Right now, there’s only 3 (which makes sense, since that’s all I’m using at the moment), but with all of them excitement over the ORC license (and some other OGL alternatives), who knows what this brave, licensed future will hold?

Why Host Them Here?

Two simple reasons.

1. I like having a simple, permanent link^[1] to each license’s text (ideally, with my name on said licenses).
2. If I’m going to have a simple, permanent link to each license’s text, it’s going to be hosted on my website.

See? Simple.

Where Are They Being Used?

• Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal
  • Most of the client CSS and JS files here, MythicWarsGame.com, and PlanarVagabond.com are released under this license (and shipped un-minified) to make it easier for others to read the underlying #web code.
  • I’ve been toying with some AI image generators for making simple pictures of magic items (as well as the odd NPC), but the Federal Copyright Office says they can’t be copyrighted, so I released them under this license as well (just so there’s no doubt).
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
  • Most of the content here and at my other sites (often stored in Markdown format).
  • Honestly, this is my favorite license to use, as it feels like it helps others build new things without enabling over-monetization (including the scourge that are web ads).
• The MIT License
  • The server-side source for most of my server-based projects (and most of the forks stashed on my Github account) are released under this license

I’m working on a few other fun projects right now, and I figure that having these links will be increasingly useful if and when I get them to launch.

Until next time, here’s to the future!

Christopher Sprigman takes another look at Richard Prince’s Instagram Exhibit, and makes some bold conclusions:

Prince’s body of appropriation art is provoking a reassessment of the meaning of authorship at a time when ownership of creative works in our digital world is tenuous. Anyone with access to the Internet can take something made by others, copy it, change it, and distribute it at the click of a mouse. In this context, we can see that authorship is not a stable concept, but rather that it shifts as technology weakens the link between an “originator” and his work. You may like that or hate that; Prince is pointing it out, in the direct way that only art can.

As a would-be artist whose done some “appropriation art” myself (as well as a longtime fan of perpetual copyright-trolls, Negativland), I find this whole discussion fascinating. However, I have to admit that I’m more than a bit surprised at the sums he’s been able to get for his “re”-work, and the implication that one man’s copyright infringement is another man’s high-brow art.