The last line of Ripost’s own description read, roughly: we stand firmly against copyright law, so we invite you to copy, share, post and repost as much as you can. Every piece of material or text, including this one.
People assumed it was a pose. It was not, and defending it internally was more interesting than defending it publicly.
The argument for it
Sharing, collaboration and reposting were not trends to be managed. They were how information moved, full stop. A media company built in that environment that spends its energy stopping people from moving its work is fighting the medium it chose to live in.
There is also the local argument. In a small language market, the scarce resource is not content. It is attention and reach. Locking a good piece of reporting behind an attribution fight in a market of a few million speakers protects almost nothing and costs almost everything.
The objections, which were fair
The main one: if anyone can take it, what stops a bigger portal from lifting our work, putting their logo on it and out-distributing us with our own material.
Nothing stops them. That was the honest answer.
What we had instead was speed and voice. A copy arrives late, and it arrives flat, because the thing being copied was written in a register the copier could not reproduce without sounding like themselves. Formats can be stolen. Tone is harder.
The second objection was commercial, and it is the real one. Advertising is sold against pageviews, and pageviews are the one thing giving away your work does reduce. Anyone who tells you an open position is free is selling something. It costs money. We took the position because the founders believed it, not because a spreadsheet approved it.
What it bought
Clarity, mostly. A position that specific settles a lot of small arguments before they happen. Nobody had to debate whether to add copy protection, whether to threaten a page that re-uploaded a video, or whether to hide the text behind an interstitial. The answer was already written down.
It also changed how people treated us. Telling an audience to take your work is a form of respect, and audiences notice. The pages that reposted us mostly credited us without being asked. The ones that did not would have taken it regardless of what a legal notice said.
The part that stayed with me
Free information is easy to believe in and hard to build for. The belief only means something when it makes you do something inconvenient: publish the thing that will be copied, keep the copy button working, watch a larger outlet run your material and do nothing about it.
I have worked on plenty of products since where the default is to protect and enclose. Ripost is the one that made me ask, each time, what the enclosure is actually protecting. Usually it is a habit rather than a business.
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