LVC is CC BY-NC-SA

This Article is an Op-Ed

When reading the Chronicle, you may have seen the notice at the bottom center that says:

All articles released under
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
We respect Fair Use.

You may not, however, know what that means.

Creative Commons

The Creative Commons is a licensing system that operates within copyright laws (both in the US and worldwide), but gives much more freedom in what people can do with the works.  The style of licensing is often called “copyleft” (a play on words), and is based on the concept that it’s better to share your work and let others build on it, than to lock it up to “protect” it.

The Creative Commons uses a “salad bar” system.  The creator of a work (in this case, the Chronicle writing news articles) chooses what requirements and restrictions they want to place on a work.  That can range from completely free for anyone to use for anything (CC-0), to rather restrictive.  Each requirement or restriction comes with a 2-letter abbreviation (except for “zero”) of the full name.  The Lodi Valley Chronicle grants everyone permission to copy, publish, share, and modify our articles–if they follow 3 rules:  Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike (BY-NC-SA).

Many of the photos included with the articles also fall under this license–but not all of them. Many of the photos we publish are done so with explicit permission of the copyright holder.  We will make an effort to include copyright information in the alt-text.  If you have any questions, please ask.

BY–Attribution

If you copy and publish any part of our articles, tell people where you got it (and include a link back to the original article).   It doesn’t have to be fancy, just something like “Originally published in the Lodi Valley Chronicle” or “Courtesy of the Lodi Valley Chronicle”.

NC–Non-Commercial

This one is a little tricky because of Fair Use (see below), but essentially it means you can’t make money from republishing our work.  So… post it on your personal blog, put it on Facebook, e-mail it to all your friends… no problem.  Print it in your newspaper, and you’re violating our copyright.

SA–Share Alike

This just means, that if you use something of our to create your own thing (like writing a new article using quotes from us) you can’t change the rules.

Fair Use

“Fair Use” is part of the Copyright Law (17 U.S.C. § 107) which says:

[use of a copyrighted work] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

This means that teachers can copy our articles and hand them out to their students without violating the law¹Of course, under our CC license, they could do this anyway.  It also means that the “Lodi Picayune-Gazette” (should such a paper ever exist) could quote our articles as part of their reporting.

The Lodi Valley Chronicle–the people who write it and contribute to it–believe that information about our city should be available for everyone to read–but we still need to protect it enough so we can make it worth our while to continue writing.

Sharing

Several of you have linked to our articles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and possibly other places we haven’t noticed.

Please Continue!

In fact… do it more.  Links are great. They get the word out and increase our readership, but–more importantly–they help area residents stay informed about what’s happening.  In return, we’d like to ask for reciprocity:  If you have news²News.  Not gossip or rumors. that you think people should know about, let us know.  20 or 30 percent of the articles we publish have come from tips sent by a handful of people.

Give us more to write about, and we’ll write more.