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nardo / Equal.Vote

Equal Vote Coalition
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consider share-alike license #3

Open wolftune opened 7 years ago

wolftune commented 7 years ago

CC-BY is a fully acceptable and free license that makes dissemination easy. I happen to prefer CC BY-SA though because it requires that when other people make adaptations or republish the work, they keep the license terms free for everyone. I suppose there's a slim downside of some less sharing, but I'm not sure that's as much of a concern as other people stripping away the license. Thoughts?

nardo commented 7 years ago

What if someone publishes a book that integrates imagery or text from this? Would they have to share the whole book text?

nardo commented 7 years ago

Generally the thought is that the Equal Vote is about the Equal Vote - we don't have a CC agenda or a Free Software agenda or anything else.

wolftune commented 7 years ago

Well, indeed, the entire question of CC license should be chosen in terms of what most furthers the Equal Vote cause.

If someone published a book using material from here, there's a couple interpretations. If they just used the images as figures or put a chapter that was just our stuff, then there's a clause in CC about compilations. Effectively, they could follow the license terms for one chapter and not others and just indicate different copyright status for each chapter of a compilation. If they used just a few bits and quotes, that's fair use and would be usable regardless of any license question.

If someone published a book or website or video that used the material in an integral way, they would indeed need to ask Equal Vote for permission or use CC BY-SA, if we used the SA license.

Really, the question is: would there be people who would publish a derivative under All Rights Reserved where we do not have permission to draw on their adaptations of the work? If so, then SA could be useful to ensure that we can freely use modifications others make. If we think that won't be an issue and just want to maximize the spread of the material, CC-BY is perhaps better.

I am totally fine with CC BY as is, I just wanted to suggest that CC BY-SA be considered. If you want to stick to CC BY, that's fine, and we can close this issue. If you think it may be a real concern that, I dunno, FairVote or someone, uses our material and makes derivative versions that they would refuse to keep under CC BY, that would be the main pragmatic reason for the SA clause. In principle, I think SA can help ensure that the open terms are passed on and thus the information spreads farther — but it's totally possible for it to spread as far or farther under CC BY. It's speculative, and I've seen good arguments for the plain CC BY.