Site Masthead: Nick's Place in non-serif white text superimposed over a bright orange high contrast tinted photograph of a brick wall taken in an extreme close up. The brick is photographed with the long continuous lines of grout running vertically. The image is displayed upside-down so the disappearing point for the grout is below the image.

Nick's Place

Nick's Place: Copyright

I'm often unsure about what I think of the world of intellectual property. I often get into a hippie stance that "all information should be free." This would be a great idea, only if a way could be found to support those who invest their time and lives in creating information.

While the shoemaker makes shoes, many including myself make information, which by its nature can be copied in such a way as to preserve the information, without compensating or acknowledging the author. Ergo, society has come up with copyrights, patents, and trademarks to protect those who create intellectual property from theft.

I don't approve of the ways in which copyrights, trademarks and patents are misused and abused by many, but I do understand and support the need for them to exist. Hey, I create intellectual property too!

So thus I maintain my rights to the intellectual property I've placed on the web, but I've licensed it to you dear reader under a Creative Commons License, specifically the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I ask you to respect my license; I've given you quite a liberal set of rights. But, if need be I will enforce my copyright, please don't make me do that.