This is one in a series of posts for mastery of del.icio.us and assumes you have a working knowledge of the system. For a complete listing of all you can do with del.icio.us, read through the help documentation. This sounds so simple, yet it's so complicated. For a myriad of reasons, del.icio.us allows you to copyright your own bookmarks. There's a laundry list of reasons for that, but mostly to avoid possible legal actions from somebody who comes up with some of the mad frivolous lawsuit money. Putting a license on your links doesn't sound like much, yet there's a few reasons you should be interested. First of all, you can use del.icio.us for categories in blogger. If there was ever a reason to copyright something, that would be it. That's material you've used to produce your own content, and anyone taking that and using it as their own would be, in effect, stealing your work. My links are not, however, any more a part of my content than anything else I link. Therefore, I've added this license to my del.icio.us links. This means:

You are free:

  • to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
  • to make derivative works
  • to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions: Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  • For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
  • Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

Now, that's just the Commons Deed, it's not the full license. It's a simplified explanation of the long, boring code nobody every reads. It does not, however, invalidate the copyright. The reason I suggest people add a license to their links is simple: people steal your feed. What we've found with splogs is that they grab your RSS feed, publish it, then use it as content for their pages and add advertising, without producing any content, and profiting off your work. Adding another layer of legality to legitimize the sanctity of content production is probably the only way to seek legal damages in the future. Another thing is some people license their material with a Creative Commons license, as Share Alike, so you're bound by this license, and any copyright, if you want to use the material. This was the other reason I changed the license on the With a linkness links. However, nothing else on this site is so licensed that way. In fact, I use a plugin called Better Feed that allows me to add this to my main content feed:

This feed is intented for private, non-commercial use. Any other use without the expressed, written consent of MacStansbury.com is unauthorized. If you're reading this anywhere other than MacStansbury.com or in a feedreader, it's been stolen. Please contact me if you find any abuse of this user agreement.

Imagine seeing that somewhere else! Long story short, license your links. Read all the posts in the 5 ways to more deliciousness 1. Add a linklist to your blog! 2. Add the feed to your feedreader! 3. Add me to your network! 4. Add a license to your links! 5. Use it.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-10-01T01:19:02.000Z'
author: John Stansbury
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