[IMC-Tech] CopyLeft, Indymedia and content licenses

[Alster]

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Hi!

Chris <chrisc at indymedia.org> wrote:
> Dada sites and some others (eg Germany) allows users to
> select a license when publishing to the newswire.
> 
> Has anyone considered that this can lead the the situation
> where various newswire posts on the same site can't be
> combined together?
> 
> For example if I upload some photos under Creative Commons
> Attribution-ShareAlike and someone else uploads some text
> under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and then
> someone wants to create a feature article using some of
> the text and some of the photos this would not be
> allowed...
[..]
> - Wikipedia:Multi-licensing
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multi-licensing

As Chris already pointed out (more or less, by adding a link to a
wikipedia page dealing with it), I believe - just like in the software
area - multi-licensing is the way to go here.

I.e. in the given case the photos which were published under the less
restrictive Attribution-ShareAlike license should have been dually
licensed under this AND the stricter
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license instead.

So, to become more concrete, my idea is to change the article submission
forms in a way where you multi-license if you do less-restrictive
licenses and where you single-license if you do the most restrictive one.

However, I'm not sure what the CC geeks would say about that approach.
There may be caveats I'm missing and there may be better ways, too.
However, for now, I would suggest to go that way (or the radical one
Pseudopunk proposes).

Pseudo Punk schrieb:
> we can also consider going for public domain or so for our content. it
> would make stuff a lot easier. the last thing i want to do when i make a
> feature is comparing the licences of all articles involved.

this wouldn't help other 'free media' sites using CC licenses and
planning to combine their and Indymedia contents, though, would it?

> also, granting indymedia the right to reuse content makes it easy for
> indymedia, but all other cool groups/organisations that use our content
> are as fucked as they're now. 

good point.

> that said, licenses were suppossed to make it easier to share or stuff. if
> they don't we shouldn't use them.

This was one of the goals we had in mind. Another was to make the
commercial badasses reconsider whether how they do things is the right
way to do things. And some may even intend to create some kind of free
media exclusiveness using licenses.

Alster
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