As the EA community grows, we have been excited by the number of people who want to reuse EA Forum content, for example:
- Translating posts into different languages
- Making audio/podcast adaptations of posts
- Excerpting content into fellowship syllabi
In order to ensure that these works follow applicable laws, we are planning to make Forum content published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
This is a widely used license which states that you can share and adapt Forum content, under the following terms:[1]
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Please see the license for full details.
Feedback on this change is appreciated. In particular: I am not sure about the noncommercial requirement. As one of our goals is to promote discussion of EA concepts, it would arguably advance our mission if (say) someone made a commercial film based on concepts from the Forum. At the same time, I can imagine authors being upset about a third party making money from something derived from their work.
Thoughts from Forum contributors on this would be appreciated!
- ^
Terms copied verbatim from the CC website. Please see the license for full details.
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.