As independent media creation becomes more common, new ways of protecting that intellectual property will be necessary. Creative Commons was fine for the hobbyist who basically wanted to say, “I don’t want to make any money with my stuff and neither can you.” But for those who truly want to make a business of it, a better method is needed. Traditional copyright is fine, but there’s no easy way for the small publisher to license their work to someone else without having an attorney draft new documents for each licensee. However, a new service is attempting to make it happen - RightsAgent.

Here’s a good article about how they intend to make it work.

Anyone who has been writing a blog or reading a blog for more than ten minutes knows how vital the comments of any post can be. And it’s no surprise that the worst “flames” and “trolls” are the anonymous comments. If I was a mathematician of any sort, I could probably correlate the value of any given blog comment with the the number of comments that person posts anonymously vs. comments they post with their real name (any takers?). In fact, there’s probably a corollary out there that says the value of any system in general increases as anonymity within the community decreases. I did find one article that comes close to such a study.

I admit, I’ve posted comments on which I did not use my real name. Nothing I said was offensive or blatantly rude, yet the three comments I did post this year were - how shall I say this - more “aggressive” than I would have been if the conversation were happening at a reception. Yet there’s always a tinge of guilt that goes along with being an “anonymous coward”, as Slashdot calls them. PennyArcade.com sums it up best with a simple blackboard formula.

A quick search of the terms “anonymous comments” in Google delivered this interesting post entitled, the The Mystery of Anonymous Comments, plus many others. It’s obvious this issue has been addressed before.

As you might expect, the more readers a blogger has, the more they have to deal with the garbage. Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis have all had to deal with it - with all of them either shutting off comments to individual posts or their blog entirely because it gets so bad.

Part of the problem lies in a vague “unwritten rule of blogging” that says that all comments must be allowed so that we can all have a world of transparency and justice. What a bunch of nonsense. I wish I could find the person that wrote that unwritten rule so I could anonymously comment on their blog that they’re a stupid fool. :) I’ve never subscribed to this and if a comment is lame, offensive, unproductive or doesn’t add anything to the discussion, I’m going to delete it. Heck, if it has bad grammar that might just be enough to get axed. So shoot me - it’s my blog - not your open forum. If you want a voice, you’re welcome to go to Blogger.com and get your own.

All this leads to one thing: the blogging world would be better if more people posted with their real name. And I’m willing to do my part. From this day forward, I am making a pact with myself and the rest of the blogging and message board world to always use my real name on any comment or post. If I’m not willing to attach what I say to my name, I shouldn’t be posting it anyway.

Feel free to post your anonymous comment - but don’t expect it to be there long.

Update: Looks like action is finally being taken against an anonymous poster. Hopefully we see more of this.