Fine Tuning Pelican: Copyright and Creative Commons Notice

Preface¶

This is one of the articles in a series about how I fine tuned my Pelican+Elegant web site to make it “more mine”. For other articles in the series, click on the title of the article under the heading “Fine Tuning Pelican” on the right side of the webpage.

Unlike my series on Choosing and Setting Up Pelican, these articles are intended to be byte sized, addressing specific fine tunings I made to my own website. As such, the first article in this series contains a Disclaimer section with generic information for each of the articles in the series.

Introduction¶

For anything that you publish, you want to make sure that you clearly state your rights as the author of the publication. In addition, if you want people to use that information in various ways, you want to make sure that you clearly state how they can use that information for their benefit. This article outlines the steps needed to ensure that the website’s copyright and any licensing is prominently displayed.

Clearly Stating The Copyright and Licensing¶

For copyright and licensing to be effective, you need it to be clearly stated in a place that is visible. One of the reasons I chose the Elegant theme is that it had a solid place for this at the bottom of the page.

To add the necessary information for Elegant to display the copyright and licensing, add the following to the pelicancpnf.py file, with your own name instead of mine:

# Legal
SITE_LICENSE = """
&copy; Copyright 2019 by Jack De Winter and licensed under a <a rel="license"
  href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">
  <img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/80x15.png" />
  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a>.
"""

This configuration accomplished three things:

1. Clearly states that the copyright for any information presented in the article, except where I denote that I am referencing someone else’s work, is mine.
2. Clearly states the license under which any information presented can be used, using both the Creative Commons icon and text.
3. Provides a link to the Creative Commons page that clearly states what the licensing agreement is.

Selecting the Right Licensing¶

While there are various licenses out there, the Creative Commons licenses have the right balance for me between maintaining my ownership of my content and allowing others to use the information cleanly. The Creative Commons Licenses Page gives a good breakdown of what the particulars of each of their licenses allows and does not allow, with easy to use pictures to allow for quick dissemination of the information.

While there are other licenses, such as the MIT License, the GNU General License, and others, for me the Creative Commons licenses are very dry and clean cut on what you can and cannot do. As I want people to use the information I am placing on my site, keeping the license simple and clean is one of my priorities.

As one of my goals is to help people, educate people, and inspire people, the most simplistic license that allows people to use the information on the website while protecting my copyright was the best solution. Based on those justifications, the CC-BY license was the right choice for me. This version allows for the sharing and adapting of the information on the website as long as any use of the information is given proper credit, or attribution. Basically, feel free to use it, but give credit where it is due.

What Was Accomplished¶

In this article, I outlined a discussion of why you want to make sure that you have copyright and licensing information on your website. I then provided a simple way of adding the copyright and licensing information to each page of a Pelican website themed with Elegant. Finally, I had a quick discussion on what you should think about when deciding on the licensing on your website, and why I chose the CC-BY license for my website.

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