The license should be opt-out (in fact I don’t think you can legally force a license on the content created by authors without their explicit consent?)
CC-BY would be a much better default choice. Commercial use is an important aspect of truly open source content.
Even better to offer multiple license options on posts, so people can tailor it to their needs. I’m a big fan of how this is handled for example in arXiv or GitHub, with multiple options.
I notice I had a hair-raising chill when reading this part:
we are planning to make Forum content published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license
This made me feel as if you were implying to be owners of the content in the Forum, which you are not—the respective authors are.
I believe that what you were trying to convey is:
We plan to add an opt-out option for authors to release future content under a XX license
There is also the question of how to handle past content.
The simplest option would be to leave everything with their default option (which for posts without an explicit license would be all-rights-reserved under current copyright law), but add the possibility for authors to change the license manually.
A more cumbersome option, but that might help with increasing the availability of content, is some sort of pop-up asking for explicit permission to change all past content of current users to CC-BY, though I imagine that can be more work to implement and not clearly worth it.
This made me feel as if you were implying to be owners of the content in the Forum, which you are not—the respective authors are.
I’m not sure why you interpret the post in this way. It is pretty standard for various academic institutions and research foundations to require that the content they publish or fund be released under an appropriate Open Access license. For example, the Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy mandates that all peer-reviewed articles, monographs, and book chapters that received any amount of funding from them, however small, must be published under a CC-BY license. There is no implication here that Wellcome Trust owns this content in any way. Instead, as funders of this research, they are free to set the conditions under which this research will be funded, and they have chosen—correctly, in my view—to fund research under the condition that it is made openly accessible to all of humanity.
The license should be opt-out (in fact I don’t think you can legally force a license on the content created by authors without their explicit consent?)
The way your parenthetical clause is phrased suggests that the claim that the license should be opt-out somehow follows from it, but that is not the case. To take a simple example, if you ever contributed to Wikipedia, your contributions were licensed under CC-BY (and GFDL). There isn’t any opt-out clause: Wikipedia is free content. I don’t see why the EA Forum shouldn’t take a similar approach. In any case, there’s nothing in the nature of copyright law that requires the adoption of an opt-out clause.
To be clear, the thing that made me feel weird is the implication that this would be applied retroactively and without explicit consent from you each user (which I assume is not what was meant, but it is how it read to me).
I’m perfectly fine with contributions going forward requiring a specific license as in arXiv (preferably requiring a minimal license that basically allows reproduction in the EA Forum and then having default options for more permissive licenses), as long as this is clearly explained (eg a disclaimer below the publish button, a pop-up, or a menu requiring you to choose a license).
I am also fine applying this change retroactively, as long as authors give their explicit permissions and have a chance before of removing content they do not want to be released this way.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. Yes, I agree that retroactive application raises separate issues. Maybe there are precedents of this that we could copy, or learn from.
The Stack Overflow case [1] that Thomas linked to in another comment seems a good place to learn from.
I think multiple license support on a post-by-post basis is a must. Old posts must be licensed as all-rights-reserved, except for the right of publication on the Forum (which is understood that the authors have granted de facto when they published).
New posts can be required to use a particular license or (even better) users can choose what license to use, with the default being preferably CC-BY per the discussion on other comments.
The license on all posts should be ideally updatable at will, and I would see it as positive to nudge users to update the license in old posts to CC-BY (perhaps sending them an email or a popup next time they log in that gathers their explicit permission to do so).
I agree that there’s a case for an opt out option here. Imposing a CC license on writers would effectively preclude certain sorts of material being posted to the forum.
For example, if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues. Likewise, it might make it hard to post drafts of things (fiction, nonfiction) that one later plans to submit to magazines (of course, a certain amount of this might already be precluded, but I think requiring a CC license would intensify the issues here). Or it might be hard to post material that’s already published, where the agreement allows reprints (because the agreement might not allow one to give others commercial rights over the material).
I suppose people could possibly get around this by posting links to Google Docs that have their own copyright conditions, but this doesn’t seem ideal.
if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues
Posting something under a permissive license doesn’t mean giving up copyright. Is the problem that some venues require exclusive licenses? (In which case, though, I would think publishing here would be a problem regardless?)
I’ve come across academic journals that allow you to post drafts pre-submission but a condition of acceptance is that you remove these before publication. But if these drafts were now CC-BY licensed, you can’t be sure you’ll have the power to do this. (In practice, you might get away with simply ignoring this, but that depends on your willingness to lie, and your willingness to do so in the context of a legally binding contract).
More generally, public sharing of drafts is pretty common in academia, but publishers often want exclusive commercial rights to use the material (at least for some period/without permission being sought). So a CC-BY license that allowed commercial use would preclude publication in some academic journals, in a way that posting to the forum previously would not have done. (Likewise with posting some already published papers, where exclusive commercial use has been granted to the publisher but non-commercial sharing is allowed).
Posting the first chapter of a fiction book might not preclude publisher interest in buying the book. But it might preclude publisher interest if doing so now means that the characters can be used for commercial gain by anyone. For example, the publisher might want the exclusive right to create action figures of the character. It’s at least unclear to me that this wouldn’t be undermined by the first chapter having been posted under a CC-BY license.
I guess as an academic and a writer, if I were forced to accept a CC-BY license I’d be much less likely to post things directly to the forum, because I wouldn’t want it to come back to bite me later, taking away some opportunity. (That said, I’m an infrequent poster in any case)
So it’s the fact that the license removes the ability to assign commercial exclusivity, involves assigning multiple rights at once (for example, in posting a story one would automatically give permission to create films based on that story, which might preclude some options), and takes away control of the material (which might be important if a publisher would later want the writer to remove it).
Epistemic status: out of my depth
The license should be opt-out (in fact I don’t think you can legally force a license on the content created by authors without their explicit consent?)
CC-BY would be a much better default choice. Commercial use is an important aspect of truly open source content.
Even better to offer multiple license options on posts, so people can tailor it to their needs. I’m a big fan of how this is handled for example in arXiv or GitHub, with multiple options.
I notice I had a hair-raising chill when reading this part:
This made me feel as if you were implying to be owners of the content in the Forum, which you are not—the respective authors are.
I believe that what you were trying to convey is:
There is also the question of how to handle past content.
The simplest option would be to leave everything with their default option (which for posts without an explicit license would be all-rights-reserved under current copyright law), but add the possibility for authors to change the license manually.
A more cumbersome option, but that might help with increasing the availability of content, is some sort of pop-up asking for explicit permission to change all past content of current users to CC-BY, though I imagine that can be more work to implement and not clearly worth it.
I’m not sure why you interpret the post in this way. It is pretty standard for various academic institutions and research foundations to require that the content they publish or fund be released under an appropriate Open Access license. For example, the Wellcome Trust’s Open Access policy mandates that all peer-reviewed articles, monographs, and book chapters that received any amount of funding from them, however small, must be published under a CC-BY license. There is no implication here that Wellcome Trust owns this content in any way. Instead, as funders of this research, they are free to set the conditions under which this research will be funded, and they have chosen—correctly, in my view—to fund research under the condition that it is made openly accessible to all of humanity.
The way your parenthetical clause is phrased suggests that the claim that the license should be opt-out somehow follows from it, but that is not the case. To take a simple example, if you ever contributed to Wikipedia, your contributions were licensed under CC-BY (and GFDL). There isn’t any opt-out clause: Wikipedia is free content. I don’t see why the EA Forum shouldn’t take a similar approach. In any case, there’s nothing in the nature of copyright law that requires the adoption of an opt-out clause.
To be clear, the thing that made me feel weird is the implication that this would be applied retroactively and without explicit consent from you each user (which I assume is not what was meant, but it is how it read to me).
I’m perfectly fine with contributions going forward requiring a specific license as in arXiv (preferably requiring a minimal license that basically allows reproduction in the EA Forum and then having default options for more permissive licenses), as long as this is clearly explained (eg a disclaimer below the publish button, a pop-up, or a menu requiring you to choose a license).
I am also fine applying this change retroactively, as long as authors give their explicit permissions and have a chance before of removing content they do not want to be released this way.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. Yes, I agree that retroactive application raises separate issues. Maybe there are precedents of this that we could copy, or learn from.
The Stack Overflow case [1] that Thomas linked to in another comment seems a good place to learn from.
I think multiple license support on a post-by-post basis is a must. Old posts must be licensed as all-rights-reserved, except for the right of publication on the Forum (which is understood that the authors have granted de facto when they published).
New posts can be required to use a particular license or (even better) users can choose what license to use, with the default being preferably CC-BY per the discussion on other comments.
The license on all posts should be ideally updatable at will, and I would see it as positive to nudge users to update the license in old posts to CC-BY (perhaps sending them an email or a popup next time they log in that gathers their explicit permission to do so).
[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchange-and-stack-overflow-have-moved-to-cc-by-sa-4-0
I agree that there’s a case for an opt out option here. Imposing a CC license on writers would effectively preclude certain sorts of material being posted to the forum.
For example, if CC-BY were mandated, it might be hard for academics to post paper drafts here, as they may need to retain the copyright of these papers in order to publish in certain venues. Likewise, it might make it hard to post drafts of things (fiction, nonfiction) that one later plans to submit to magazines (of course, a certain amount of this might already be precluded, but I think requiring a CC license would intensify the issues here). Or it might be hard to post material that’s already published, where the agreement allows reprints (because the agreement might not allow one to give others commercial rights over the material).
I suppose people could possibly get around this by posting links to Google Docs that have their own copyright conditions, but this doesn’t seem ideal.
Posting something under a permissive license doesn’t mean giving up copyright. Is the problem that some venues require exclusive licenses? (In which case, though, I would think publishing here would be a problem regardless?)
Some examples.
I’ve come across academic journals that allow you to post drafts pre-submission but a condition of acceptance is that you remove these before publication. But if these drafts were now CC-BY licensed, you can’t be sure you’ll have the power to do this. (In practice, you might get away with simply ignoring this, but that depends on your willingness to lie, and your willingness to do so in the context of a legally binding contract).
More generally, public sharing of drafts is pretty common in academia, but publishers often want exclusive commercial rights to use the material (at least for some period/without permission being sought). So a CC-BY license that allowed commercial use would preclude publication in some academic journals, in a way that posting to the forum previously would not have done. (Likewise with posting some already published papers, where exclusive commercial use has been granted to the publisher but non-commercial sharing is allowed).
Posting the first chapter of a fiction book might not preclude publisher interest in buying the book. But it might preclude publisher interest if doing so now means that the characters can be used for commercial gain by anyone. For example, the publisher might want the exclusive right to create action figures of the character. It’s at least unclear to me that this wouldn’t be undermined by the first chapter having been posted under a CC-BY license.
I guess as an academic and a writer, if I were forced to accept a CC-BY license I’d be much less likely to post things directly to the forum, because I wouldn’t want it to come back to bite me later, taking away some opportunity. (That said, I’m an infrequent poster in any case)
So it’s the fact that the license removes the ability to assign commercial exclusivity, involves assigning multiple rights at once (for example, in posting a story one would automatically give permission to create films based on that story, which might preclude some options), and takes away control of the material (which might be important if a publisher would later want the writer to remove it).
This is a great list! Thanks for elaborating!