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’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