Update: as of May 25 May 29, performance has been excellent for the past 5 10 days or so.  Thanks to everyone at Dreamhost for getting things straightened out!

Thank you.

The net is that I have decided to take Sam Ruby’s advice, which was to adapt the copyright license used by the Apache Software Foundation.   Specifically, for comments posted starting today, you retain ownership of your copyright.  In return for having your comment posted, you grant to me:

“…a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your comment contribution and derivative works thereof.”

As noted in the agreement, I thus reserve the right to republish such material in any form, but I promise to make reasonable efforts to retain the attribution to you.

I apologize again for the concerns that the original policy raised, and I hope that this policy is an improvement.  Thanks to Sam, Ben Adida, all the commentators on the original thread, and everyone who helped me to understand the concerns and the options. To everyone who reads the Arcane Domain blog, your comments are always very much appreciated!

Noah

The reason I ask you to transfer copyright is simple, and it’s not that I want to steal your content. It’s somewhat messy to have a work, such as this blog, for which the copyright is held in bits and pieces by lots of different people. Let’s say someday a new publishing medium comes along, as the Web did a few years ago, and I want to republish this content that new way. Holding the copyright makes it simple: I have the right to do that, just as I have the right to make as many backup copies as I like, to share the content with anyone I like, or potentially to excerpt some of the exchanges in a book.  So, that’s why I took this approach.  I also make very clear on the copyright page that I am very supportive of fair use, and that applies to comments as well as other content.  Indeed, if you contact me and ask permission to use content for this blog for some purpose beyond fair use, I think you’ll find that I tend to be very generous in granting permissions for such reuse.

One concern was raised that I should have thought of but didn’t:  transfering the copyright on your comments to me could mean that you lose the rights to use that same content yourself. That was never my intention, and so I have updated the terms you agree to when posting comments to include the following:

In return for transferring your copyright, you are hereby given a fully paid license to use the content you’ve posted in any manner that you wish, including the right to republish in any form or using any medium.

The copyright page has also been updated to make clear that this same license is granted retroactively for comments already posted.  Of course, as the comment submission form also makes clear:

If this agreement is not acceptable, an alternative is for you to post your comment on your own blog or other public Web site, and to post a link to that here. That way, you may retain ownership of your own material.

Are there other ways of solving this problem? No doubt, but this one is ultimately simple and feels right to me, given what I understand of the applicable laws.  I thank you for your understanding, and also for your contributions to this blog.

Noah

It’s taken me a long time to put this blog on the air, but I’ve had a good time along the way learning about building WordPress themes that scale with window and font size, learning how to back up MySQL, how to move an existing blog to a new hosting provider,  how to use CSS well, and lots of other things that won’t interest you unless you like building Web sites.   Now it’s time to flip the “on” switch.

The idea of having everyone publish on the Web struck me as wonderful from the start:  I think I first heard of the idea while talking with Dave Winer at the O’Reilly Peer to Peer conference in 2001, though Tim Berners-Lee assures us this was his intention for the Web all along. The notion of publishing with a blog model that’s basically like writing everything on one long roll of paper, gradually letting even the important old entries disappear behind the new, seemed in some ways a compromise.  It’s taken me awhile to figure out how I wanted to balance the convenience of updating a blog that users can subscribe to, with the richer structure available from a traditional Web site.  The answer I came to was: do both.

So, I’m also today turning on the Arcane Domain Web site at http://www.arcanedomain.com.  Right now it’s mostly got some basic information about me, and some rough starts on subject-specific pages, but over time I will use it to collect information about computer and Internet technology, music, photography, food, my work and publications, politics, books, and other interests of mine. The intent is to use the Web site for information that should be easier to find, that shouldn’t tend to get buried over time, and that can be updated in place as necessary.  When I make significant changes to the site, I’ll usually post a heads-up announcement in the blog too.

Here finally is the blog, and along with it the Web site.  I hope you enjoy them both.

Noah Mendelsohn
January 25, 2009