Letting Go is Hard to Do

A few weeks ago, Leo Babauta published a great post entitled "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway (or, the Privatization of the English Language)" about yet another idiocy of the intellectual monopolists. Now he has another, winningly-entitled: "The Culture of Sharing: Why Releasing Copyright Will Be the Smartest Thing You Do." Here's the core message:

Last year I Uncopyrighted my blog, Zen Habits, and my ebook, Zen To Done, and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. People have used my articles in blogs, newsletters, magazines, ebooks, books and more. And yes, they’ve made profits off me without me getting any of that money … but at the same time, I’ve benefitted: my ideas have spread, my name and brand have spread, and my readership has grown and grown. Since I Uncopyrighted the blog, it has grown from about 30K subscribers to 113K.

You can Uncopyright your blog, your ebooks, and even your print books. And I can almost guarantee you: it’ll be the best thing you can do as a writer.

His heart is certainly in the right place; the only problem is that "uncopyrighting" is not as easy as it looks. Although Creative Commons has come out with what it calls cc0 - "no copyright" - I believe that in some jurisdictions it's practically impossible to renounce your rights as a creator (I'd be interested in receiving confirmation or refutation of this point.)

What you *can* do even there (presumably) is to adopt a licence that grants considerable rights to users (like the GNU GPL). But it's worth noting that most of these *depend* on copyright law, rather than denying it completely.