My philosophy on copyright is very simple (and this is mirrored by the wisdom the American Founding Fathers showed in this matter): sending our police officers out to get killed enforcing copyright restrictions if there is not a clear reason why this advances the progress of useful science or is otherwise fundamental to the workings of society, is a suboptimal use of resources for reasons including: their propensity to refuse the order and revolt, consequent acclimation to following irrational orders and so increasing the risk that they will follow other irrational orders, and the waste of human capital when they get injured and die.
Examples of justified restrictions would be putting together newspapers and history books, where you want to make sure people can get paid for doing necessary work, so that they will actually produce what is required. Another example is a business’s website, source code, and general administrative paperwork – if somebody can up and steal everything that took so much investment to create, you kill the incentive to work to build organizations that are capable of meeting people’s economic needs, and so the needed work is not going to get done (and people will starve).
Examples of unjustified restrictions would be copyrights on fiction, since there is no clear case for supplying fiction at the cost of cops getting killed. There is also the case where we in the society need something, but we do not need to use force to produce it in sufficient quantities; for example, if history can get produced at sufficient quality and quantity without laws protecting it, there is no justification for having history copyrights either.
The material I present on this website is generally:
1. Hopefully useful, so I want a big audience (arguing against copyright protection)
2. Sometimes excerpted or taken via fair use from authoritative copyrighted references
3. Sometimes it’s just a lot of applied common sense or prior art
4. General historical facts or information, not specifically based on monographs and academic papers. Consequently, citing references in these cases is a capricious exercise consisting of answering “which of the 20 sources where I have heard this well-known fact should I cite, and why is that source any more credible than my own assertion at this point”. I do, however, strive to provide references where I feel it is helpful.
In theory, the material as a whole (and certainly in part where the original work took a lot of investment and so is under copyright) would sometimes qualify for copyright protection, since it should be useful information that benefits society. However, I want to eliminate as many barriers as possible to this philosophy and this method being widely used; if it stays on the website, it wastes its potential. I want people to copy it, distribute it, and use it to capture value.
Further, I feel a debt of gratitude to others that have also put their material into the public domain and like kinds of open access, and I think they would agree with my approach. I believe that such approaches usually optimize societal benefit by providing the widest possible application of knowledge.
Therefore, except where noted and as required based on the reference material or contributions to the site, (poke me if I’m lazy and haven’t updated copyright notices somewhere), information posted on this website is in the public domain. I want no excuses as to why people are not doing things that are in their best interest.