Creative Commons

In a conversation I had last week, a professor planned to use slides from lecture notes he found on the web in his own slides. He planned to give attribution to the original producers of the slides but did he need to contact them beforehand for permission. Technically yes, material put on the web is copyrighted by default. But if he sent them email most responses would be of the form, "Please don't waste my time!"

To deal with this issue, Creative Commons has a nice service giving an easy way to release some rights for online material. So I've added a link on the left column of the web log that basically allows you to modify and distribute the material in this weblog for noncommercial use with attribution. No need to ask me, not that anyone has.

On another note, I'm on vacation next week and off the internet. Back after that.