“No one has ever become poor by giving.” by Anne Frank

This is to announce that I am relinquishing my copyright on all the contents of this website. Put in another way, I shall not claim any intellectual property right on all my posts, images, or any element that you may find useful in this site; you are free to copy them and even claim them as your own.

This website could not have been made possible without the help of so many people. Foremost is Ms. Celine Roque a.k.a. Frugal Pinoy who readily, patiently and without hesitation shared everything I needed to learn without expecting anything in return.

The others are:

• EdZee of Owning an I-Cafe
• James of PinoyMoneyTalk
• Tyrone of Millionaire Acts
• YellowMinded who up to now chooses to remain a mystery
• Andy Adan, my great buddy, of Graphitect, Inc
• My friend of more than twenty years, Atty. Noel Jocson and her beloved wife, Mrs. Liza Jocson, who gave me a great tour of Sta. Rosa and Silang, Cavite last October 1
• Mrs. Nelly C. Gomez, Sta. Rosa City’s Assessor and so many more

I know I can never pay them back, so I’ll pay it forward.

The first three guys on the list, by the way, are finalists in the 2009 Philippine Blog Awards; Business Category. They don’t know it, but I constantly lurk in their blogs and try to emulate their style and the overall look and feel of their sites. I only follow the best.

My research on copyright laws led me to Creative Commons (CC) – a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. This organization works to counter what its founder, Lawrence Lessig, describes as

an increasingly restrictive Permission Culture; a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of the creators of the past.

With this in mind, I am using Creatrive Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. I am granting anyone full permission to use any of my own original contents in any way you like which means:

You are free:

to Share – to copy, distribute and transmit my own content whether for commercial or non-commercial use

to Remix – to adapt, alter, transform or build upon my own content

Under the following conditions:

Attribution: Ideally, I would welcome that you credit me for my content and a link back to the original will be greatly appreciated. But you are under no legal obligation to do so. And if you do so, make sure that no suggestion or insinuation shall be made that I endorse you or your work that built upon my content.

Share Alike (Optional): If you alter, transform, or build upon my content, you may distribute the resulting work under the same, similar or compatible license to this one, if you like.

Content refers to all my original written articles or blogs, images and everything else that you see in it. You can even make a mirror copy of my blog for all you like.

Important: This so-called “open source copyright” applies only to my own content. It does not in anyway apply to the websites or articles to which I have linked to; you are duty-bound to respect their  copyright.

Neither shall it apply to the guest-written article that was just featured in this website and to future ones. The authors of such articles shall keep exclusive rights and ownership of their articles but grant this website the right to edit and publish said articles royalty-free. Edited articles shall be for the approval of the original author prior to publication. The authors are free to submit the same exact articles to other websites or publications, preferably, but not necessarily, with prior notice to this website.

My take on copyright laws

Some of you may be wondering why I’m offering such an open-door policy on my work.

First, I’m not a big fan of copyright laws in the internet. This is not to say that I will not respect the copyright license of other creators; I shall and always will. My open source copyright policy only applies to those who want to use the contents of this website but not to me when I visit other websites and research their contents.

I always do my best to make my contents as useful and as informative as possible. But for all intents and purposes, these contents may turn out to be nothing more than a collection of baloney and crap to you. So why impose restrictive copyright on something whose usefulness I can never guarantee? (kindly read my Disclaimer) However, in the event that you find some of them useful, that alone is reward in itself.

If you look at all creative works, not just in the internet, but also in the physical world, many are not really original. They are a mere collection, mutation or permutation of information that have already long existed, what Lawrence Lessig  calls creations derived from creators of the past.

The internet has been very good to us; it has given us access to vast amount of information freely in ways we never imagined were possible. So, who am I to do the opposite?

If you think my idea of an open source copyright is new, you are very much mistaken. I ripped it off from someone who encourages others to rip off his contents. His name is Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, rated by Time Magazine as number nine among the 25 best blogs in the world for 2009. He calls his Open Source Blogging.

This guy completely blew me away!

This open source copyright license is not a stunt that simply followed Leo’s lead just for its shock value or to create buzz. I truly believe in the original promise of the Internet:

…to enable people to imagine, innovate and create upon the resources available therein

Sadly, as Lessig puts it: “this is the environment that cultural monopolists, mostly media giants, try to undermine in order to maintain their profit.”

Thanks a lot

One standard feature of this blog and most other blogs is the comment section where readers are encouraged to post comments on each entry. I personally welcome whatever comment my readers may throw at me, whether positive or negative, as long as they’re constructive and honest. I also welcome those from fellow bloggers whose comments create  links to their own websites or blogs; it’s a common practice among bloggers as a way for us to help generate traffic to one another’s sites.

What I don’t welcome are spam comments, which I receive scores of. These comments are created not by people but by what we call robots, spiders or web crawlers. These are programs used by bloggers to propagate their websites across thousands, even hundreds of thousands of websites in the internet with the click of a button.

Did you know that you may comment as many times as you like but none of them may ever appear? It’s because web admins like me have the final say on whether we want to publish your comments or not. We get first dibs on your comments. We may even edit your comments and spin them around if we like (I swear, I’ll never do that).

But let’s get on to the meat of the matter – What is Gravatar?

This image  used to be the default avatar of all commenters, including myself, in this site; it’s called the mystery man avatar and looks like a shooting target, it’s ugly: ( So far, only one visitor who’s a professional blogger himself, has figured out the beauty and importance of having a gravatar.

“Gravatar is short for Globally recognized avatar… or icon, or representation of you and follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things on any blog, web forum or website.”

Created by Tom Werner , a gravatar makes it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web,” including Facebook. That’s unless you modify your profile settings in each website, social media network or forum that you have ever been to or will become a member of.

Isn’t that cool?

Warning to forum “tambays” who enjoy trolling or flaming – your identities will be revealed.

I just signed up at Gravatar and uploaded an image (not my picture; if you want to see how ugly I am, check out the bottom part of my About page) to promote the use of Gravatar. So now, all others who commented have the Gravatar logo as their default avatar.

Change it by grabbing your own globally recognized avatar at gravatar.com and establish a personalized online presence in the world wide web and let’s all cease looking like shooting targets in every forum and website that we frequent.

Thanks a lot

References: WordPress.org, Gravatar.com