You Have the Right To License Your Content

The Seemit Terms of Service do not state that any license is applied to the content you post on this website. Without any license on your content, your posts may be legally liable to be taken and used by anybody, for any purpose, without consequence. However, you can take steps to protect your content by attaching a simple license to your posts.

Options for Post Licensing

Licensing gives you power over how your content is used. Here I summarize a few different popular licenses and how you can apply them to your own work. A popular service for licensing work is Creative Commons, an organization that creates and utilizes licenses that allow work to be redistributed and used most effectively. Currently, there are over 1.2 billion works licensed by Creative Commons. For an example of how a license is used, check the bottom of this post!

License	Use
Copyright (©)	All rights of usage belong to the author of the work.
Public Domain (CC0)	The author resigns all rights to the work, which may be used for any purpose with no restriction.
Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)	The work can be distributed and used freely for any purpose, so long as the author is credited.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)	The work can be distributed and used freely for any purpose, so long as the author is credited, and derivatives of the work are shared under this same license.
Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs (CC BY-ND)	The work can be distributed and used freely for any purpose, so long its copies remain unmodified, and the author is credited.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC)	The work can be distributed and used freely for noncommercial purposes, so long as the author is credited.
Other Creative Commons	While the basic features are covered here, there are more options for CC licensing.

The Collaborative Commons and You

The collaborative commons is the idea that as an online community, we all benefit when we share resources with each other. It's a core concept of the Steemit community that has been written about before, and it is also an inspiration behind the founding of the @sndbox incubator.

In order to support the collaborative commons, it is important to produce Free Cultural Works that can be "readily used, shared, and remixed by others" and contribute "toward creating a commons of freely reusable materials." Steemit is an incredibly valuable platform simply because can reward the creation of these works, and incentivizes contribution to the collaborative commons.

A Copyright logo on a DVD. This image belongs to the public
domain (CC0), and therefore does not require attribution.

My Choice: CC BY

I personally care that I get credit for my work, and I would like things that I create to support the creative commons. To this end, CC BY is a satisfactory license for me. This issue initially came to my attention around the practice of publishing academic literature. Many scientific publishers, such as the Public Library of Science use CC BY in all of their publishing, in order to disseminate the results of research most effectively. I hope you've found a license that will work for you, too!

Sources

^{About The Licenses. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

CC0. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/

Frequently Asked Questions. (2017, August 29). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://creativecommons.org/faq/#what-is-copyright-and-why-does-it-matter

kevinwong. (2017, August 1). Why Should You Consider Putting Your Extra Time, Effort, and Resources Into Being Part of The Collaborative Commons? Retrieved September 26, 2017, from @kevinwong/why-should-you-consider-putting-your-extra-time-effort-and-resources-into-being-part-of-the-collaborative-commons

State of the Commons – Creative Commons 2016. (2016). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://stateof.creativecommons.org/

Terms of Service. (2016, April 28). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://steemit.com/tos.html

voronoi. (2017, August). Why I Left My Office Job : The Blockchain Ecosystem Will Empower A Better, Stronger, More Collaborative Future. Retrieved September 26, 2017, from @voronoi/why-i-left-my-office-job-the-blockchain-ecosystem-will-empower-a-better-stronger-more-collaborative-future

Why Open Access? (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://www.plos.org/open-access}

Thanks for reading!

^{This work is free for any use with attribution under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) License.}

Licensing Steemit Content: Who Owns Your Posts?