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What with the whole share! discuss! community! open! freedom! nature of today’s web, the legal issues associated with borrowing, referencing, displaying, or quoting someone else’s work can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Meanwhile, copyright law is such a complex tangled mess it can be really difficult to know what is and isn’t allowed, and how to make sure your work is protected while being accessible.

Fortunately for those of you us without legal degrees, content protection and the free flow of information have been necking since 2001, thanks to the Creative Commons.

Read on to learn about sharing like your momma taught you.

Some rights reserved

The Creative Commons allows you to choose just how many rights you’d like to reserve for your work by offering an assortment of licensing choices, ranging from relatively restrictive to an all out free-for-all.

Our content, as you may notice, is licensed as “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5.” This basically means you can share this with whoever you want in whatever way you want, as long as you’re not hawking it (it’s a little more detailed, but that’s the gist).

The six main license types are listed and explained in-depth on their website. I should also mention that all licensing is free.

How legit is it?

Johnny Law gives it two thumbs up. Earlier this year, the first Creative Commons license was upheld in court .

And for those of you who put more stock in grunge music than Johnny Law, it’s also legitimate enough to have been used by Pearl Jam for their latest video release.

Sticking it to The Man

The point of this type of licensing is to allow the everyman to be able to easily share information, especially since a huge portion of information today is being created by the everyman.

According to Wikipedia, Creative Commons’ chairman of the board Lawrence Lessig feels that

”...modern culture is dominated by traditional content distributors in order to maintain and strengthen their monopolies on cultural products such as popular music and popular cinema, and that Creative Commons can provide alternatives to these restrictions.”

Now swipe this article in the name of freedom.

Shake fist, sigh in frustration, repeat.

Update: The number has finally been fixed. Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused!

When we moved into our new office, we decided it would be nice to sign up for VoIP (telephone over the Internet). That way, we could keep our phone number no matter where we moved in the future.

I’m still optimistic about the service, but during the transfer of our existing phone number (972 943-0472) to our new provider the number somehow ended up in a black hole. So for the next few days while they get this situated, please direct any phone calls to my cell phone at 979 574-6649.

As some of you may know, our first credit union client and the reason for our entry into this industry was Houston Federal Credit Union. During the project we worked closely with their Senior VP of Finance and Technology, Christopher Choat, and gained a tremendous respect for his hard work and commitment to the success of HFCU.

The Credit Union Times announced in the May 3rd edition that Chris has been named as the new CEO and will assume that role in June, when their current CEO retires.

We want to offer our congratulations to Chris and our best wishes to Sally McKnight, HFCU’s retiring CEO. Though we never had an opportunity to work with Sally, we’ve heard nothing but great things!

We’ve been going through the “startup initiation process” since as long as Trabian has been together (and even before, when it was just a baby at Matt’s teet). I’m referring to the very gradual and gritty, but always exciting ascent that all infant companies must make in the name of 1) loving what they do, 2) making an impact and 3) never having to get a real job.

For Trabian, this has included such things as living on ramen, our executive staff (Matt and Trey) going for months without paychecks, and of course using Matt’s spare bedroom as our worldwide corporate headquarters. We still love ramen very much, but are happy (unbelievably happy) to announce that we have moved into a living, breathing, big and beautiful office.

We’re all so excited we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Matt keeps shouting “Viva Trabian!” and smashing bottles of champagne on the wall, Trey will not stop his celebratory break dancing, and Mark is constantly singing the theme song from “The Jeffersons.”

I, of course, continue to work with diligence and vision. Because that is my way – raw discipline. Check out pictures after the jump.