Copyright, licenses and mapmaking...

Been finishing off some top-down map assets for Wonderdraft tonight - which led to some thinking about how I want to license assets like that - obviously it's good to get them out so folks can use them, but equally it'd be nice to see some small reward for the time that I put in.

A bit of thought and discussion later - stuff like that (map assets, 3D files, etc - not scenarios or the like) I'n going to put out as CC-BY-NC, which means it's under a Creative Commons (CC) license, so you can use it for your own projects; if you publish the result for others to use, you should credit me (BY); and this is restricted to Non-Commercial (NC) use.

Commercial use? Ask me. To quote what I've said on the linked page, while I am (obviously) interesting in making some small return on my effort, I’m equally interested in supporting independent creators and getting my work out there. Depending on who you are and what your project is, commercial licenses for things I create may range anywhere from ‘just give me a credit’ upwards.

Setting up a blog: Part 2 - headers, footers and sidebars

Ok, so, you have a post. But it's looking kind of lonely by itself, and everyone else's blog has cool sidebars and stuff...

Right. Go to your blog's management page (click on the B in a square, top left if you're not there already), and click Layout.

You should see a bunch of boxes that contain things labelled 'gadgets' in something that looks like the rough layout of things on your main blog page. (Tip for this: pick a theme like 'Simple' or 'Awesome Inc' for starters, as it makes working with this much more obvious. Don't pick "Notable"!)

Lets go through some of these. All you need to do to make changes is click the little Edit link in the bottom right corner of the gadget's box.

• The Favicon gadget just sets the icon that appears in your browser toolbar when you visit the site. All you need is a small logo, 100px square, and you just upload it.
• The Header->Navbar gadget controls the Blogger navber across the top of your page - you can turn it off, or change its colours to match your blog.
• The Header->Page Header gadget allows you to set a banner image, fix the title and change the description of your blog. 

Ignore the boxes with 'Add a gadget' in for now - we'll cover useful other gadgets next time.

• In the Main section, you have the Blog Posts gadget - this allows you to configure things like the date format, how many posts or how many days of posts to display, what data you want to display about the post, etc. Again, it's all pretty self-explanatory and like everything else here, the beauty of it is it's really hard to break things!
• Featured Post allows you to tag a post as being exactly that, if the theme supports it. You can make it the most recent or if, say, you have a welcome/about post you want to be always visible, you can make it that instead.
• Popular Posts gadget - does what it says on the tin - one thing to be aware of is that you can define the time range over which 'popular' is measured, depending on whether you want a bias towards recent material. I have a very odd post that has an insane amount of hits (well over 20,000 and twice as much as the next nearest...) for no reason I can see, and I've tweaked that setting so it gets ignored as being too old.

Now we come to the sidebar:

• The About Me gadget takes your 'about me' entry from your Google profile as your author bio. You may want to consider if you actually want to do this, especially if you use your Google account for multiple things and thus have a non-subject-specific bio! If you don't, but still want a bio in the sidebar, I'll show you how in the next post.
• Blog Archive shows a list of posts by month, or week, or day - very handy for letting your users navigate through your posting history once you have one.
• Labels: as you probably noticed last time, you can label a post with keywords, This just allows viewers to click on a keyword and find the posts that use it. Both this and the Blog Archive you might want to remove until you have enough posts for it not to be embarrassing. 
• Report Abuse: link so viewers can do exactly that. Not configurable beyond having it there or not.
• Pages gadget - you can create static pages in your blog - such as the Linnius Campaign one here. They're a useful way of keeping more permanent content handy, and this gadget lets you display a list.
• Search this Blog, and Follow By Email. Do what they say on the tin.

Last, the footer.

• Attribution gadget. If you do nothing else, go read this article and then edit this gadget so your blog has a copyright/attribution notice, and consider creating a copyright page. And remember to change the year every Jan 1 (like I forgot last year)!

And there you go. Pretty sure some of this was obvious, but I hope there was some useful insight here. Next time, adding new gadgets.

Musing about copyright again

Y'know, for someone who actively dislikes both the 40K game and GW's business practices, I do have a fair few blog posts about it. "Methinks", to misquote the Bard, "he doth protest too much."

40K 7th edition is, apparently, out, to the usual collection of applause, curiosity and complaints about changes that break the system. Regular readers will be unsurprised to learn that, personally, I couldn't give the proverbial rat's posterior.

However, I am concerned to note that there are people blatantly making downloads of the text (both as ePub and PDF) available online.

Now, I do have to hold my hand up here and admit that I do have 'hooky' PDFs and/or ePubs of a few sets of wargames rules, but they are in all cases either long out of print (and sitting on my eBay watch list, as often as not, for as soon as a decent second hand copy comes along), or things for which I have a legal physical copy, wanted one for the iPad and one wasn't available. You are thus, if you wish, at liberty to call me a hypocrite for what follows, but I personally am very clear where I draw the line, namely at the point where I'm not paying for something for which the publisher/author is still in a position to take money from me for. That is unquestionably theft.

Seriously, folks? It may be GW, and it may be ridiculously expensive, but it it's a brand new, in print, set of wargames rules which you can buy. Whatever you think of their business practices, and whatever your views may be of the greyer area of out-of-print and/or digital copies of print rules, this is the wrong side of that line.

Some observations about blogging and copyright

Prompted, as I mentioned yesterday by a post from Andrew 'Loki' Saunders in the Bloggers Wargames Group on Google+. I suggest you read it, and the comments: I'm deliberately not paraphrasing the contents here, as I'd like to ensure any search queries on the matter get directed to his blog.

I am not a lawyer, so please don't consider this post legal advice, or sue me if, by following your interpretation of my interpretation, someone else sues you :D Your country's copyright law may be subtly different to mine.

That said, let's talk about both your copyright and other people's :)

Copyright, in general, subsists in any expression of an original work. You can't copyright an idea, but you can copyright any expression of that idea in any material form including digital, at which point you own all the rights to it, unless and until they expire or you choose to give some or all of them away. This therefore means, technically, that anything on the Internet is copyright its original author, and you may not copy it (beyond the necessary magical copying that happens behind the scenes to allow you to view it) without their permission.

Let me just repeat that one. Just because it's on the Internet and you can see it, it doesn't mean you can copy it and use it, unless the author explicitly or implicitly (by a blanket statement) gives you permission.

Regular readers may notice the recent appearance of a Copyright page on this blog. It's a Creative Commons licence, in fact, which says, in a nutshell, you are free to use or modify my work for any non-commercial purpose provided you credit me. All other rights are mine, but note that I may choose to grant you (for example) commercial rights if you ask and we reach an agreement.

It's dead simple to set up a page like that one - in fact, the Creative Commons folks provide you with copious links and sample wording, and it costs you nothing. We are a friendly community, and it's simple courtesy to respect someone's rights (and hey, they get a link from you, and will probably return the favour, so we all win). Make cool stuff, share it, give credit where it's due. Simples!

Other things you should be aware of:

• Amazon book cover images used for the purpose of driving traffic to Amazon and made by their Link To This Product tool implicitly have permission. I would suspect that technically they don't for other uses.
• Flickr, Google Images and Wikipedia, among others, make it easy to find out the copyright/use status of an image, and what you need to do/say in order to be able to use it. It's not hard to add a caption in Blogger with the appropriate stuff.
• A lot of national archive photos from many countries are free to use.
• A photo of a copyright work for review/illustration/discussion purposes is covered under fair use. 
• Straight digital copying of art from a copyright work for review etc probably isn't - it's certainly a grey area, and I have a couple of images on this blog I need to get OKs for :D
• (In fact, I have a few pictures generally I need to check out!)
• Some material is genuinely out of copyright, and fair game. Note that the typical period is 70 years, which takes us back to 1943, usefully!

But, once again...

• Just 'cause it's online, doesn't mean it's free!