Any kind of licensing or copyright has similar enforcement difficulties unless you have a team of lawyers.

If I for example wants to use your work here on a commercial basis and not giving you any credit, you cannot do anything about it except opposing it. No legalities can prevent me from doing it since my actions are governed by another country’s juridical legislatures and their laws.

But it’s still important to think about licenses and copyright issues. Matt adresses some good points about it.

Generally speaking, I think that open-content advocates have a slight tendency to over-license things. This is not meant as a criticism, since I include myself in this as well. We don’t want people to be constrained by the full force of copyright in using our works, but we often don’t think enough about the implications of the licenses that we choose to use.

Clearly, a big open source project needs to have an explicit license because it is part of the culture of trust that makes people feel that they will not be exploited. It is also important for things like music and video, since people are used to the idea that they will be sent a take-down notice if they use copyrighted content without authorization. However, short articles, such as those that might appear on a noticeboard at work or in a local newsletter, rarely come with an explicit license and I don’t really think they need one. It would obviously be bad if we all became license extremists and felt the need to slap explicit licenses on every sentence that we ever uttered.

Therefore, I remain undecided about whether it is useful to put an explicit license on a blog, but I have the feeling that most blogs are closer to the noticeboard articles than to the things that obviously need to be licensed. In most cases, it is very unlikely that anyone would want to repost the entire article, unless they were planning on passing it off as their own, which they are not entitled to do even if you have no explicit license. Most people wouldn’t want to do more than take a small quote from an article and link to you, which they could do under fair use in any case. It would be different if the article was a detailed and useful guide to something, e.g. running through how to setup SVN for Elgg, which someone might want to copy into the documentation, but you could issue licenses on a per-post basis to cover things like this rather than having a blanket license for the whole blog.

As for terms of service, it would be very unusual to have explicit terms for an individual self-hosted blog for the following reasons:

- Unless you are planning on hiring a lawyer, it would probably end up being a copy and paste job from another site, and the result of that is highly unlikely to be legally enforceable.

- It remains to be seen whether even highly sophisticated legalese terms are enforceable because they have never been tested in court.

- Most terms of service end up having to say something like you reserve the right to do anything you like, since you have to cover all manner of unforeseen circumstances, and this kind of defeats the purpose of anything more reasonable that you might want to write into the terms.

Great comment and a great point.

Point taken in fact. Do you think the text below works? I hacked the theme’s app/templates/respond.php. I should learn to make a WordPress Plugin.

In addition I suppose I should add a Terms of Service page.

These things are usually very explicit in the terms of service of hosted services (usually to the detriment of contributors), but not so for self-hosted sites that usually have no terms of service at all.

I don’t actually mind what people want to do with my comments, since I don’t regard them as particularly valuable, but I’m just highlighting a point of principle.