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[Jason Calacanis]

On 8/6/07, Fred Benenson <fred.benenson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yochai Benkler licensed his most recent book "wealth of networks" under a CC license.

good catch, but:

a) my point remains the same: maintaining your exclusive copyright is
not viewed as "uninteresting" or a downside to most artists---most
artist like the idea of getting compensated for their art.

b) Weath of Networks is Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial
license.... and I think that might be where we wind up at Mahalo. I'm
going to wait and see what license our folks want to use  and the
impact on the business.

> Its also a misconception that you can't pay people to create freely licensed work. Many
> businesses do this.

Well, I never said that.... and I of course agree with you. Google and
Firefox have hundreds of fulltime staff working on free software after
all!

> Also, CC licenses and the Gpl all depend on copyright to work.

True.

> How much of the success of your blogs was dependent on you leveraging the copyright of your
> authors over the ability of your audience to access (and reuse, reference, quote from, etc) the
> content of those blogs? My feeling is that the majority of the success of web logs Inc is based off
> of the fact that people can freely access the work that you pay your authors for, and more
> importantly, reference and comment on it.  Despite its legal status (all rights reserved) I'd say
> your content is less proprietary than you or Jimmy thinks.

Free access to the content is very different then letting people
monitze it outside of your organization.

Sure, people should get it for free on the web, but they shouldn't be
able to make money off it because that is dilutive to our ability to
make money. Advertisers should be able to buy Engadget or Joystiq 20
different places... there should be one phone  number they call for
it.

So, in fact, it was very, very important for us to protect our work on
the blogs. In fact, we have many folks steal our content, without any
credit, and make thousands of dollars in advertising off of it. That
money should have been going to our authors and staff and it didn't.
That caused confusion in the marketplace as to who owned the content.
We had to fight very hard to keep people from stealing out content day
in and day out.

Theft of content is a huge problem on the web.... freely licensed
simply allows you to not worry about it.

The truth is Answers.com makes millions of dollars off of Wikipedia's
content and that money should belong--at least in large part--to the
Wikipedia's foundation. It's ironic to watch Answers.com rake in money
hand over fist with Wikipedia's content while Wikipedia struggles to
keep the foundation going. Wikipedia should be non-commercial in my
mind and let folks like Answers *pay* for a license to leverage it.

Of course, Jimmy is much smarter than me so I would go with his advice. :-)

Best j
---------------------
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Mobile: 310-456-4900
My blog: http://www.calacanis.com
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis