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Charity is a great writer, developer and graphic artist. She has absolutely amazed me with some of her creations. It is definitely worth your time and energy to go browse through her creativity. I can promise you, you won’t be disappointed.

I am actually thinking about turning this into a series. I started this morning doing a little reading at some of the different blogs and I came across Charity’s blog. I have read her stuff before and have always been impressed not only by her writing talent, but her talent as a graphics designer. She really is quite good. She is one of those people you sit back and think to yourself, “Man! I wish I was that good”. She just recently posted regarding some online tools available to protect content and creative work. As a graphic artist she is concerned about her graphic creations, as well she should be. Robbery happens all the time in the online world and anyone who is thinking about offering their creativity to the world needs to bear in mind that there are relatively few tools available to lock down their content. (Incidentally I am using her trademark above, and I hope she doesn’t mind.) For myself I have solved the problem of copyright and creative protection and it’s really quite easy. The thing is not everyone subscribes to my notion.The way I solve the problem is to simply not copyright anything. After meandering around the web trying to protect my graphics using overlays, and transparent images, I finally just gave up. Not that I was getting robbed of my content, it just wasn’t important enough to me to spend time trying to manage protection. It just really isn’t that important to me. While I hope and pray no-one blatantly plagiarizes my written content or takes my images without at least crediting me, I decided it just simply wasn’t worth the time involved trying to keep my stuff under lock and key. In addition to this, it kinda goes against my ideals as an open-source evangelist. Now, before anyone starts getting irate about my open-sourceness please allow me the liberty to clarify. While I am a huge supporter of open-source I am definitely not a thief when it comes to someone else’s creativity. I am not going to sit here all day long screaming about how software SHOULD be open-source, then go out and steal a copy of Windows or Adobe. That’s just dumb and it goes against the ethical code of a true open-source advocate. A true advocate, would just simply go out and get Linux, or GIMP, or Open BSD. Not sit there and complain about proprietary code and then steal and use that same proprietary code all day long.

Charity gets paid based on her graphic design work because she is a professional, and as a professional she (as well as everybody else creating stuff) has the right to creative protection. I personally have waived this right. Now I am also not foolish enough to say, “I will never protect my content”, because I know that things change, situations change, contexts change. One day I might very well return to the protection of my contributions, but until then, I just figure that if I post it out on the Internet somebody, somewhere, with more technological expertise than myself is more than likely going to rip off my stuff. So if I just simply expect my stuff will be pirated, and don’t try to protect it, I won’t be disappointed when someone actually does. This is easy for me to do, because most of the graphics I personally create are mediocre at best. If I was a REAL pro like Charity, I might not take the theft of my stuff so lightly!

Keep up the great work Charity, you truly have a gift!