The Free and Clear weblog comment license
By submitting a comment to this weblog, you are granting me a non-exclusive, non-revocable license to display your comment, here or on any other site I control, and to create derivative works from your comment, either by editing it in any way, including changing the details of the attribution, removing your link, your name, or both, or by inserting snarky comments making fun of you, or to delete your comment, or to never publish it at all. I rarely mess with comments, but you’re telling me I can, if I so choose. That’s the Free part.
If you submit your comment with a working email address, that address will not be shown to the public, but you may at any time ask me to remove your name and your URL from any comment you’ve left, for any reason, by sending me an email from the address you submitted with the comment. That’s the Clear part: if you can’t stand what I’ve done with my Freedom, I’ll do what I can to Clear any connection with you, though I will not delete the comment itself. Unless, of course, I choose to.
And yes, an inability to remain serious for two paragraphs is one of the reasons I’m not a lawyer.
While that sounds rather like I’m claiming the world, and giving you nothing but a rather gnawed bone in return, it’s actually primarily inspired by Sam Ruby’s Bathroom Wall Principle comment that
Anything short of ”I can do anything I want with your comment” means I’m obligated to you, simply because you typed something in my form. However, claiming no obligation to you at all leaves you a little too much at my mercy, so I’ll accept the obligation to file off your serial numbers, if you ask in the one way I can tell it’s you asking.
Some other inspiration:
Another reason you’re not a lawyer is that I can actually understand your terms and conditions - humorous as they may be.
Spam, or not?
“Reply hazy, try again.”
Oops, didn’t seem at all hazy to me, so I deleted your parent before I saw you there, and left you hanging in space.
Akismet apparently agreed with you, but my feeling is, in a place where I encourage and expect real names, if you claim that your name is ”SEO” you are at least 95% of the way to being spam, with so much momentum built up that a comment of off-topic platitudes and a link to a sploggy URL on Blog*Spot don’t stand a chance of stopping you.
Yeah, I’d have leaned in the direction of the delete button, too. It was a fun opportunity to fire up the ol’ 8-ball, though. :-)
You actually deleted that comment in the timeframe between my opening the archive page and posting my comment. When hit I had [Add comment], the page came back without the comment, and with mine thus hidden. Heh.
Parenthetical: how does one mark up smilies? I usually use
<tt>– which is not available here. So I picked<kbd>…PS.: your comments and entries feed links on bottom of the frontpage still advertise themselves as “RSS”, even though, as I was relieved to find, they’re not.
I’m not sure there is a good way to mark up smilies: you aren’t telling someone what to type, so
<kbd>doesn’t seem a good fit, but presentational markup around ASCII art seems… unpretty. I’m sure that people have made a case for <acronym title=”Smile”>:-)</acronym>, despite that being quite a stretch.Me, I haven’t gotten tired of having WordPress replace them with images, yet, though I’m sure I will ;)
And thanks for the reminder about the feed links, which are not only lying about their format, they are using a pseudoprotocol for exactly the sort of thing the TAG has said not to use a pseudoprotocol for, with good reason.