[Search-l] New Mahalo license, features.

[Jason Calacanis]

On 12/13/07, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 14, 2007 12:01 PM, Jason Calacanis <jason at calacanis.com> wrote:
> > Following up on our discussion from a little bit back, Mahalo has
> > moved to a somewhat limited Creative Commons license.
> I'm sorry to hear that.
> "No Derivative Works" is the least sensible license for a wiki. Every
> time you edit a page, you are making a derivative work.

Well, we are a business that *pays* the folks who create the work, so
we have a special concern that folks will take the entire thing, mash
it up and dilute our ability to pay those writers.

It's my job to make sure we protect the jobs of those writers. At
Weblogs, Inc. (engadget, autoblog, joystiq, etc) we had hundreds of
writers getting paid millions of dollars... if we made the content
available under a mashup commercial use license we could not have done
that.

For now, folks can just email me and if what they want to do is
reasonable we'll participate. If there is money to be made we'll make
an arrangement that protects our writers ability to be paid for their
work. That seems reasonable to me.

You know, not everyone wants to write for free for a venture-backed
startup. If some do, well more power to them. However, as a writer by
trade I find it kind of offensive that everyone at some crowd-sourced
companies driven by writers/artists get paid... EXCEPT THE
WRITERS/ARTIST. I can never understand why the managers, VCs,
programmers, ad-sales folks, PR people, etc. can all make a great
salary and the chance at millions in stock options, but the writers
have to work for free.

For a non-profit like the Wikipedia I totally understand of course...
noble mission an all. for a for-profit company? I don't get it.

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