The notion of allowing access to your website content and data via API's and other machine readable means is well embedded in geek circles.
This presentation aims to look at the non-technical reasons why these approaches are a good idea, arguing that it is time for Machine Readable Data (MRD) approaches to be better communicated to content owners, budget holders and other non-technical stakeholders.
ISWC2009 Tutorial on Legal and Social Frameworks for Sharing Data on the Web http://www.opendatacommons.org/events/iswc-2009-legal-social-sharing-data-web/
We believe that dedicating data to the public domain is the best way to ensure that data is universally reusable and remixable. When data is public domain it means that it can be reused automatically without needing to check terms and conditions or track the source of every statement to provide attribution. These kinds of things act as friction to reuse, wasting energy that could be better spent creating inspiring things.