26 September 2007

Creative Commons licenses and the Romanian web

Lately I started to publish my tutorials in the Romanian language too, in addition to the original English version and I observed an annoying thing: people take the content and re-publish it on their own sites (which is fine, this is why I use CC-BY-SA) but they tend to not follow the license: do not attribute the source, do not link back and do not share alike, even more, in those conditions they hot link images back from my site (this give me the unexpected advantage of easily tracking them).

I contacted those people, outlined the license and politely requested credit and share alike. Usually they reply nicely and comply, even if I have to further explain what are the requirements of the license.

My conclusion is that the Romanian public is generally not informed properly about licenses and Creative Commons, so an information campaign is needed to raise awareness, so here is a short introduction about the main Creative Commons licenses, written on a Romanian language blog.

To further this effort, I guess I could try to translate the full text of the licenses in the Romanian language, but I don't think this is the best thing as (1) is not wise to have an engineer translating legal stuff and (2) a localized version of the license (as CC has for various regions) will need input about the local law from a local lawyer.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like you need to recruit some bilingual Romanian IP lawyers to the cause.

    ReplyDelete