I created a website on Glitch.com that’s supposed to be a work of fiction. It’s a website built by a fictional character and it has a README.md file where the character is talking to the website’s audience. It’s an experiment.
Glitch has a way to easily add a license to any project, so I added the MIT License. I chose to add a license as sort of a best practice that I thought was good to include and promote. The license lists who the copyright should be attributed to, and this is where my issue is. Should I interrupt the illusion of the fiction/character my putting my name for the copyright attribution, since I’m the actual creator of both, or should I put the character’s name for the attribution and maintain the illusion? I was leaning towards the latter, but thought that it could set a bad precedent that licenses and attribution info don’t need to be taken too seriously.
Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this sort of thing?
It wasnt built by a fictional character, it was built by a real person you, albeit using an alias.
You have assumed a nom de plume and assigned the licence to this name. Like many writers.
Sounds reasonable to me. The purpose of a licence is to control unauthorised usage of the material and reserve rights and royalties. It is also to maintain creative ownership and bragging rights. If you are due royalties then you might have trouble proving that you are the author. You might also have difficulties excercising your rights as the original creator unless you somehow register the nom de plume in your own name thus assuming all rights to any creations bearing this name. (I am making this up by the way, I am not an authority in these things) It may be so that the licence is void because it is not the name of a real person, I dont really know but thank you for entertaining me. I love these types of concepts.
But you might also want to create some mystique and release the works into the wild and let it take on a life of its own, for arts sake, it is licenced to a name which I assume nobody else owns and therefore is unlikely to be assumed by another person claiming it as their own original works.
So it all depends on your purpose and if it holds any value for you as a commercial work.
My 2c.
Ps. I would love to see the work but the link is a generic glitch.com link, do you have a specific link to the work?
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Hm, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Thank you! I really appreciate the thoughtful response.
Here’s the link to the Glitch project. It’s really a reworked version of the Tribute Project I did for fCC. The fiction part is mostly in the README.md file. I’m not sure how successful of an experiment it is, but it was a fun first try 
. Next time I should probably do more with in-character comments in the HTML and CSS. I have some ideas for a few other fiction websites/apps, but we’ll see.
Here’s a link the site itself, but you can’t see the README file from there:
https://bigfoot-central.glitch.me/
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