Content sharing & collaboration is best achieved using a CC or GPL license to waive a few rights. wpCop explains how to use Creative Commons.
wpCop's content guides talk a lot about copyright, that © thing. We know that this means ‘All rights reserved'. We know that, excepting those fair use cases, people must ask for permission before recycling our content. We know that a work is copyrighted on creation.
But what if we want to share our content, waiving certain rights? What if we want to collaborate on projects or to co-author with friends and perhaps with folks we've never even met? We could employ a lawyer to draft a license but, then again, that's pricey and, besides, who'd bother to read it, even if they understand it?
Sack lawyers, employ creative commons!
This is where copyright's co-worker, Creative Commons, shows up. CC enables us to grant rights for others to reuse a work while we retain copyright.
There are six flavors:
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Additionally, Creative Commons has a No Rights Reserved license, the CC0, for waiving copyright entirely. WordPress theme and plugin producers, meanwhile, often use licenses written for software distribution and collaboration such as the GNU General Public License (or GPL) which, as it happens, is the permit under which WordPressitself is released:
Site and feed licensing
Site-wide and feed content licensing is most easily achieved using the Creative Commons Configurator plugin. It says it supports only until 2.8.4 but that's incorrect. It works fine:
Once activated click on the License tab in the Dashboard's Settings panel and, in the plugin's options page, click on the select a Creative Commons license link. That takes you to the Creative Commons site where, as shown here, you're asked three plain questions:
Following the plugin's wizard is as easy as 1-2-3
Follow the prompts which, back at the plugin options page, let you add attribution details and automatically embed the code or copy tags so you can embed code manually in theme files.
Alternatively, if you prefer to show a license and logo in a sidebar or footer, you can add code to a text widget by following these instructions.
If you need more targeted licensing for specific content, you can create a permit here, pasting the code into a post or theme file. For more information about Creative Commons here's the inevitable:
