Fight Aging!

All Fight Aging! posts - and the archives - are now published under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. In short, this means that you are encouraged to republish and rewrite Fight Aging! content in any way you see fit, the only requirements being that you (a) link to the original, (b) attribute the author, and (c) attribute Fight Aging!. Have at it.

Fight Aging! has in fact been Creative Commons licensed for a long time, but under a license that restricted commercial reuse and derivative works. That it was that way for a good few years is more a measure of inertia than representative of my views on the topic of licensing and ownership of data in this brave new age of copy, paste, edit, and republish. In essence, I think it's sensible not to write laws that can't be enforced, and - for many of the same underlying reasons - it is either charmingly old-fashioned or hopelessly out of touch to ask people to refrain from doing whatever they like with data published to the internet.

I do think that the whole notion of intellectual property as an edifice of government is a great malignancy forced upon human creativity. It isn't required for common politeness on the matter of respecting an author's work, nor for businesses to be built upon that work. But it does serve to stifle vital competition, hold back progress, and breed a legion of rent seekers, ranging from the high-tech patent troll to Walt Disney's legacy and beyond. Unfortunately a great deal of medical science is also well infected by intellectual property, and the damage to progress is done there as well.

So one should act as one talks. The Attribution license is a good compromise between the natural state of do as you will with the data and the impulse to offer a modicum of respect for the original author. It's a request to be a good citizen and generally decent human being if you find value in anything published here, and want to build upon it.