Any parent will tell you that the “good cop / bad cop” routine has stood the test of time for one reason: It works.
Do any of these sound familiar?
“You’d better not let mom see you eating that before dinner.”
“You just wait until your father gets home.”
You can exercise authority just by using the suggestion that something might not be cool with someone else who shares your authority. Most of the time, this will work even without the other person being involved — or even knowing the scheme took place.
But as individual blog authors, we are all pretty much single parents when it comes to dealing with (sincere) requests to appropriate, translate, etc. the content we work so hard to produce. Assuming you are gonna be nice about it (after all, they actually asked rather than just scraped) it still takes time to craft an answer for their particular situation. This usually involves a brief discussion of copyright, and how many hours you put into developing content, and so on.
And if you do not spend the time to write back and say no, many people will just assume the absence of a (time-consuming) “no” is a good substitute for a “yes.” So you have to do something.
A little while back, I got the bright idea to put all of those thoughts down in a general framework and call it a Terms of Service page. I mean, just about every other web organization has a TOS, right? Why not blogs?
The result has been a drastic reduction in people writing to me to ask if they can do the things I would not want them to do, and an easy answer to those people who either read it and write you anyway, or write to you without seeing the TOS page.
Example:
Dear XXXX;
Thanks for writing to me to ask about _________ (fill in the blank).
The fact that you even asked before just doing it tells me that your ethical compass point is better than most. I’m sorry, but _________ activity in question) is against the site’s TOS. I get requests like this frequently and while I would like to be involved in many more co-publishing projects, time limitations prevent that.
And I am sure that you can understand that with all of the time I spend on producing original content, it is very important to me to make sure people visit my site to see it rather than going to someone else’s.
Thanks again for taking the time to ask. You can see the TOS page here.
Thanks much,
David HobbyStrobist.com
I have never even had a person question the idea of a TOS for a blog. (And why would they?) If I get a return email, it is usually along the lines of, “Wow, thanks for writing back. I hadn’t even seen the TOS page.”
Works great.
One last thing. You’re a blogger, which means that your TOS page can be much cooler than, say, Microsoft’s TOS page. Have some fun. Threaten
some bodily harm. Throw in an ancient Gypsy curse or two. It shows that you can be serious about something that is very important to your, and still maintain a sense of humor.
___________________________
David Hobby blogs about photographic lighting techniques at Strobist. This use of this article in other publications or website is subject to the conditions spelled out in Strobist’s Terms of Service.
