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GTDreamsmith

Limited License Translation

A translation of the limited license agreement into plain English:

Grant of Limited License:

A license is legal permission to use something that does not belong to you.¹ In this case, you, the author, are granting me, the owner of this website, a license to use the material you submit (which continues to belong to you, thus I require legal permission to make use of it) under the limited and specific conditions explained below.

By submitting content to this website, the author automatically grants the owner of this website

The act of submitting your content is your way of indicating that you do indeed grant me this license.

a royalty-free,

I don't need to pay money to use your material.

non-exclusive

You may grant other people the right to use your material.

and non-transferable

I can't sell my right to use your material to someone else. For example, if someone bought this website from me, they wouldn't acquire the rights to your material along with it.

license to use that material on this website.

You're giving me permission to publish your material on my website, as long as the conditions of this agreement are honored.

The owner of this website may make changes to formatting, spelling, or grammar, but may make no other changes without the author's express permission.

I can make changes to the presentation, and correct minor errors, but I can't modify the actual content without your permission.

In no case may the owner of this website make use of the author's material without crediting the author in an obvious manner.

If and when I use your content, I must make it clear that it is your content, not my own.

The author may revoke the license to use this material in the future for any reason.

If you sell or give exclusive use of your material to someone else, or if you're in any way unhappy with the way I use your material, or for any other reason you want, you can force me to remove your content from my website.

Fair enough? Someone should suggest this license to Yahoo Groups/GeoCities/etc. (Heh, that'll be the day...)

Incidently, I came up with this license for submissions to my website after seeing some of the problems with others, particularly Themestream after it closed down. People were concerned that Themestream would sell the rights to publish their work to others. If someone submits content to a website, they are implicitly granting license to the site, but the exact conditions are not entirely clear. Most professional sites like Yahoo or Themestream therefore make explicit the conditions, and include things like transferability and irrevocability, as well as the right to modify works as they see fit. These are cause for serious concern for many authors, and I have no need or desire for these rights. But since it's not clear that I don't receive these rights under the implicit license granted by a website submission, I decided to make an explicit license where I make it clear that I do not receive those rights. Like the GPL for software, this license is used for the exact opposite purpose these licenses are usually written for -- mine is designed to protect the rights of the author, not the rights of the website owner.

If you have any concerns over this license, please feel free to email me. If there are any problems with this license, I will be more than happy to modify it to fix them.

1. "But I need a license to drive my car, and my car belongs to me!" Actually, no. You may drive your car all you want without a license, as long as you do it on private property. What your driver's license gives you permission to use is public roads.

You're right, though, this definition of "license" is not entirely correct. What a license does is give you the legal right to do something it would not otherwise be legal for you to do. But when it comes to copyright, this effectively boils down to the definition I gave at the beginning. Whoever holds the copyright on a work (usually the author unless sold or given to someone else) can copy and publish the work. No one else can legally do so, except when they've been granted license to do so by the copyright owner.