Reposting Information

A number of people have asked me questions like "can I quote your blog in my blog?", "can I post your article in my wiki?", "can I use this information in my MSDN Magazine article?" and so on.

It is nice of you to ask, particularly since there is practically nothing I can do to stop you should you choose to do so.

If what you're looking for is legal permission then I am the wrong person to ask. Everything on this blog is copyright Microsoft Corporation, and I do not speak for Microsoft Corporation in that regard. (I write the blog at work, so the company owns it; it's the same as every other page of documentation on MSDN.)

I am not a lawyer. If you have questions about copyright law then you should consult a copyright lawyer who can advise you on what constitutes "fair use" and how to go about obtaining any necessary permissions for your use of this copyrighted material.

If what you're looking for is my personal opinion on reposting blog material, my personal opinion is that I write this blog so that the information in it can be disseminated as efficiently as possible to those people whom it helps in their jobs; I appreciate that the whole point of syndicated content is that it can be picked up, aggregated, and republished, and I certainly do not want to work against that or discourage the benign use of such services. But I also do not want to create additional work for myself or liabilities for others. So, please use good judgment and be willing to take responsibility when you disseminate someone else's copyrighted content.

I personally do not care if you repost my blog, but I would appreciate the following courtesies:

1) Please give me a heads-up before you do.
2) Please attribute the source, preferably with a link back to the original.
3) Please don't quote me out of context.
4) Please understand that by doing so, you entirely remove my ability to correct mistakes in your copy. I do not want to be in the position of having to track down a hundred copies of a post when I want to correct a mistake or add a clarification.

I therefore encourage you to publish links rather than copies. Links do not have copyright issues, links automatically take you to the most up-to-date version, links aren't out of context. Links are better.