Lisensa - Online Copyright Transaction Service

This post seemingly comes in the right moment, after the posts on copyright and creative commons licenses. I found out about Lisensa through the blog post by Darren Rowse.

Lisensa is a online copyright transaction service provider for content generated by people online. It presently provides the service for blogs and RSS/Atom feeds. It automates the process of transaction between the copyright holder and any tentative buyers who might want to use the content that has been copyrighted. It provides the service free of charge, but takes a cut of 10% from all the revenue generated through the transactions.

The blog or the RSS/Atom owners need to register their content at Lisensa, and then choose the licensing terms. After that, Lisensa handles all the transactions with any tentative buyers. The licensing terms are based on the Creative Commons license set. It is basically for those content that has the Attribution and Non-Commercial Usage license attached to it. All the commercial usage would require a deal with the copyright holder.

These days where your online content is usually not safe, because it may easily be picked up by splogs, scrappers, feed publishers, who would publish your content without giving any attribution to you. Lisensa seems to protect you from such people - but as with any law, the fact stands that you cannot literally protect your work. It is quite unlikely that people with such malicious intent would go through your license and try to get the content legally.

But Licensa does seem to provide a platform for copyright transactions and automate it. As of now, it does not actively seek to sell your content, but they may include such feature in the future - increasing your revenue.