Maybe The Blogosphere Is Better WITHOUT Copyright?

When someone creates something and puts it on the internet, there is always a risk that people will take that creation and do whatever they want with it. On one hand it’s costing a lot of people a lot of money, and possibly their careers. On the other hand copyright violations and content stealing has powered most of what we love about the internet anyway.

There is a lot written about why we need copyright laws. Why we should protect our work from getting stolen. But to play devil’s advocate… what if you opened your content to the Public Domain? What if you “released” the copyright to your blog?

I’ve been on both sides of this matter. Once a blogger decided to use one of my blog’s names as their own name and I had to sue them. Once another blogger accused me of stealing their content (even though if I used the same “logic” they did, they stole not only most of their own content from my blog… but their entire site was a knock-off of IFB.) Then again, IFB is a knock-off of another site, Problogger. So yeah, there’s that. I make no bones about stealing and being stolen from on the intellectual property front.

“In the 4 years I’ve done this experiment, releasing copyright has not hurt me, the creator of the content, a single bit.”

In 2008, Leo Baubuta of Zen Habits released his entire blog to the Public Domain. He loosely asked for credit for use of his work, “Attribution is appreciated, but not required.” By 2010, Time Magazine placed him on a list of the top 25 blogs in the world. He said “In the 4 years I’ve done this experiment, releasing copyright has not hurt me, the creator of the content, a single bit.”

It made me wonder if in fact we had been going about “owning” the content of our blogs. Sure, it sucks if someone uses the same idea and got credit for it. I mean, like the “High on Potenuse” skit on Key & Peele, especially if someone steals your idea and gets credit for it.

Anyone can steal an idea once. But it takes talent to keep the brilliant ideas coming. Instead of spending energy on thinking about who copied what, spend that energy on how to come up with a more brilliant idea that can’t ever be copied or stolen. Maybe that’s when you’ll find your true calling.