Action: Content Reuse Licensing of your G+ contributions
A few weeks ago, Filip H.F. Slagter posted a "Licensing details for republication of textual content submitted by me to Google+". It provides permission, under specific scope for others to archive his work on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/112064652966583500522/posts/atqNXYS4FSp
This is an excellent idea, and I encourage others to do this.
There are a number of questions as to what license you should use, and how you should apply it. I've been thinking about this, and am going to suggest a basic approach.
The TL;DR: Using the CC BY-ND-NC license should be a safe minimum start, add it to your pinned SignalFlare post, your G+ "About" page, and an off-G+ location.
The Creative Commons licenses are a well-designed, widely-used, and well-understood set of licenses. FiXato is using one of them. The full set is listed and described here:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Considerations
For the purposes of archival, clear permission to make and post copies of content are required. But you need not grant rights to modify or allow commercial use of content, if you don't wish to do so.
A license can expand the rights of a licensee, but cannot (nearly ever) reduce those rights. And there are rights under copyright which are generally granted, though these vary by jurisdiction. Specifying a re-use license is expanding rather than reducing options for others.
As the author and copyright holder of a work, you can grant additional rights at any time, either unilaterally or by request. The idea here is to allow others at least the minimum rights required to create and publish archives.
There's a fair body of legal theory that says you cannot withdraw rights granted, once issued, for works already published, for various reasons (estoppel being a major element). Which means that if you're not sure you need to grant specific rights, you may be better off not granting those now, and arranging to do so later, as that's possible (see above) but withdrawing rights is far less tractable.
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses generally focus on
BY: Attribution -- the author is credited. Always present.
SA: Share-alike -- derivatives must also be shared under the same terms.
ND: No derivatives -- no derivatives (exclusive with SA).
NC: No commercial use -- no commercial use.
This results in a set of six licenses: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-SA-NC, and CC BY-ND-NC. These are generally more-to-less permissive as you reach the end of the list.
The CC BY-ND-NC license -- attribution, no derivatives, no commercial use -- is sufficient for noncommercial archival of content. If you want to start with a minimum license grant which you can potentially expand in future, this should be appropriate.
And if you want to reserve a minimal number of rights (that is, grant all possible rights), there is a CC0 "No rights reserved" public domain grant:
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0
The licenses are described, and the deeds and legal code are included at this link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
My recommendation is that you include this grant on your pinned SignalFlare post, as well as your G+ Profile About page. Simply as this will make the grant easier to find. You can of course post the grant anywhere else you like, but keeping it associated with your G+ profile will assist those who are making archives. An off-Google+ copy should survive the G+ shutdown itself.
You do not have to do this, but if you would like others to be able to archive your content, this will be quite useful.
You may also restrict grants to, say, text but not photos or other types of media.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
A few weeks ago, Filip H.F. Slagter posted a "Licensing details for republication of textual content submitted by me to Google+". It provides permission, under specific scope for others to archive his work on Google+:
https://plus.google.com/112064652966583500522/posts/atqNXYS4FSp
This is an excellent idea, and I encourage others to do this.
There are a number of questions as to what license you should use, and how you should apply it. I've been thinking about this, and am going to suggest a basic approach.
The TL;DR: Using the CC BY-ND-NC license should be a safe minimum start, add it to your pinned SignalFlare post, your G+ "About" page, and an off-G+ location.
The Creative Commons licenses are a well-designed, widely-used, and well-understood set of licenses. FiXato is using one of them. The full set is listed and described here:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Considerations
For the purposes of archival, clear permission to make and post copies of content are required. But you need not grant rights to modify or allow commercial use of content, if you don't wish to do so.
A license can expand the rights of a licensee, but cannot (nearly ever) reduce those rights. And there are rights under copyright which are generally granted, though these vary by jurisdiction. Specifying a re-use license is expanding rather than reducing options for others.
As the author and copyright holder of a work, you can grant additional rights at any time, either unilaterally or by request. The idea here is to allow others at least the minimum rights required to create and publish archives.
There's a fair body of legal theory that says you cannot withdraw rights granted, once issued, for works already published, for various reasons (estoppel being a major element). Which means that if you're not sure you need to grant specific rights, you may be better off not granting those now, and arranging to do so later, as that's possible (see above) but withdrawing rights is far less tractable.
The Creative Commons (CC) licenses generally focus on
BY: Attribution -- the author is credited. Always present.
SA: Share-alike -- derivatives must also be shared under the same terms.
ND: No derivatives -- no derivatives (exclusive with SA).
NC: No commercial use -- no commercial use.
This results in a set of six licenses: CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-SA-NC, and CC BY-ND-NC. These are generally more-to-less permissive as you reach the end of the list.
The CC BY-ND-NC license -- attribution, no derivatives, no commercial use -- is sufficient for noncommercial archival of content. If you want to start with a minimum license grant which you can potentially expand in future, this should be appropriate.
And if you want to reserve a minimal number of rights (that is, grant all possible rights), there is a CC0 "No rights reserved" public domain grant:
https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0
The licenses are described, and the deeds and legal code are included at this link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
My recommendation is that you include this grant on your pinned SignalFlare post, as well as your G+ Profile About page. Simply as this will make the grant easier to find. You can of course post the grant anywhere else you like, but keeping it associated with your G+ profile will assist those who are making archives. An off-Google+ copy should survive the G+ shutdown itself.
You do not have to do this, but if you would like others to be able to archive your content, this will be quite useful.
You may also restrict grants to, say, text but not photos or other types of media.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
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