Please read carefully up to the first heading. Everything else is context and commentary.

Everything on this site (davidalexlamb.com) implicitly also includes “Copyright <relevant year> by <original author>,” unless stated otherwise. “Relevant year” is usually part of the date on the page or blog post, and “original author” is usually me, David Alex Lamb.

Some material, though copyrighted, is available via some form of Creative Commons license, which means you can copy it but only in the ways stated in the licence. See the very end of this page.

Why This Matters

Context

Well, first, do you care about following the law, as established by a long history of treaties over many decades? I guess lots of people don’t.

Maybe caring about your effect on other people matters?

Up in the banner for my site, it says I identify as “scholar, writer, computer geek.” For the first two identities, people like me usually make no money from what we write. Even a textbook earns little in these days of easy-to-find pirate sites. What matters to scholars, and many other kinds of writer, is credit: recognition that we created something that affected somebody. So when you copy something, you’re stealing an intangible reward that helps keep us producing the stuff you liked that you copied. If you want us to keep going, it matters that you acknowledge who we are. It also helps other people find us, so they can possibly benefit from what we do.

Do not underestimate the value of credit. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times somebody told me how much my teaching meant to them, but even those few kept me going through some dark times.

Plus, there are plenty of people who do make a nontrivial portion of their income from their creative work, and copying is literally stealing money from them. When my one commercial textbook came out, I was an underpaid academic with a mortgage, two very young kids, and a wife who was working very hard at home as their primary caregiver. The money I made from that book during those few years improved four people’s quality of life a lot.

Giving Credit

Academia has a lot of picky rules about how you acknowledge your sources, but they all boil down to: ensure your reader can, as easily as possible, find the full original of what you’re citing. For stuff on the Internet, it might suffice to give a link (especially to something rarely edited, like a blog post), but for a web page that might change a lot (like many Wikipedia pages), or which might disappear (like blog posts after the site owner runs out of money to maintain it), you should consider adding the date you accessed it. This might let someone find the long-gone original via the Wayback Machine, archive.org.

Picky Details

Fair Use

I Am Not A Lawyer (IANAL), so the ins and outs of exceptions to the forbidding of copying are beyond me, especially as they can vary depending on what legal jurisdiction you’re in. What affects my writing the most is: when I copy text literally from a source (which can be necessary when one is discussing fine points where the original is the clearest explanation, for example, or is especially elegant), I clearly indicate that it’s a quote (usually by putting quote marks around it, or doing that plus setting it off via indenting) and cite the original (perhaps with more detailed information, such as a page or section number).

It’s a bit tricky to judge how long a quote should be. It’s often best to paraphrase most of the prose in your own words. It benefits you, by exercising your creative intellectual abilities. It benefits your reader, since your own way of thinking about the material can be inspirational.

Public Domain

(IANAL again): When something is in the “Public Domain,” anyone can copy and edit and publish the result. But there are only two ways something enters the public domain: either the copyright holder explicitly releases it into the public domain, or the legal duration of the copyright (often life of the author plus 70 years) expires.

The fact that something appears on the internet without a copyright notice does not mean it is in the public domain.

Commentary

I occasionally write blog posts about copyright-related issues, and will likely list new ones here.

Citing Websites and E-books

Creative Commons License

This license applies to the original version of this page from January 6, 2026. I might change the page, and then might choose to modify the licence of the edited page, but, legally, the original license applies to the original page in perpetuity.