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Copyright follow-up
Authored by: robg on Jun 01, '05 01:28:45PM
david-bo asks:

"What will happen to the copyright?"

A very fair question, David. Per the contract with Macworld, they did not purchase any of the copyrights to hints from third parties -- they couldn't, since I didn't own them. You own the copyright on the original submission, and you still do so. Macworld only purchased the domain and its copyrights, along with the copyright to anything that I wrote.

"I was/am perfectly fine with that a more or less idealistic, non-profit seeking, person could gain some revenue from my contributions - however, I am defininately not happy with that IDG starts to earn money from my contributions without paying me."

macosxhints.com has had the following "right to use" license on the submission page for quite a while now:
You retain the copyright on your hint, but macosxhints.com has a right to use your hint for any purpose, including but not limited to potential publication in books and magazines and use on other macosxhints websites (such as the forum site). Whenever possible, attribution to you as the source will be given, but this is neither required nor assumed.
That statement basically gives me the right to use whatever appears here in anything else I that I do, verbatim if I wanted to do so. And since November of 2003, yes, I have been using the hints from the site as the basis for the column. The interesting thing to note is that, even though I have the rights to do so, nearly everything I put in the column is written from scratch -- I look at the subject and the writeup on each hint, but then I start with a blank piece of paper. Why don't I use the hints verbatim, as the submission page license allows me to? Because writing for print is an entirely different animal than writing for the web. So I basically sit down with a list of cool subject matter from the site, then write up new descriptions for how to accomplish those cool things. As such, the final result is really my original work and not the work of anyone else.

There's an important thing to keep in mind, too: with one major exception (which I'll describe below), the topics covered on hints are not in and of themselves copyrightable. Take, for instance, today's hint on removing the grace period from the sudo command. While you can certainly have a copyright on your description of that process, nobody can own the knowledge of the process. So if you and I both write up a "how to" on this matter, and we do it on our own, they will come out looking similar (since the process we're describing is the same), but the end result will be two different copyrightable works. But neither of us will own the copyright on the knowledge of the hint; just our specific version of how to do it.

The exception is, of course, original scripts -- AppleScripts, shell scripts, and now, probably (to some extent) Automator actions and Spotlight queries. Although the disclaimer is still in place on the submission page, I have a new plan for action now that the site is part of IDG. If I wish to use any such scripts outside of macosxhints.com, I will seek the original submitter's approval first. If I can't secure permission, then I'll either not cover that subject, or I'll just have to include a link to the web site in the article, instead of including the script itself.

In short, I'm going to do my best to make sure we don't upset anyone over the possible use of their material. As noted, this mainly applies to scripts, as the knowledge of hints isn't subject to copyright and I never use them as-is. But if you are still uncomfortable with this arrangement, please contact me via email and I'll make certain that your work here never appears anywhere else within IDG. I'm also going to put a (somewhat shorter) version of this reply on the Q&A page, as it's definitely important to address.

-rob.

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