[cc-community] re creative commons on forum postings

Evan Prodromou evan at bad.dynu.ca
Sun Nov 7 13:58:24 EST 2004


On Sun, 2004-07-11 at 17:22 +0000, Alan Bradbury wrote:

> Hi all

Hi, Alan!

> I don't know what licence or what wording is needed to establish CC
> attribution for works posted on a forum, and which is then able to
> ensure attribution to the poster rather than the board?

So, this is my take on the matter; I'm just another schmo like you, so
don't think this is gospel or anything.

Anyways, for authors, you should probably notify them with a page
describing the license policy for the board. Something like:

        When you post to this board, you release your work under the
        Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license. Your statements can be
        copied to other boards, used in books, magazines, or newspapers,
        adapted for movies or song lyrics or paintings. People who
        redistribute or adapt your words have to give you credit and
        note any changes they've made.

Some people also add a checkbox for each post under the main text area,
like:

        [ ] I release this post under the Creative Commons Attribution
        2.0 license.

...and posts where the checkbox isn't checked are rejected. Sometimes it
makes sense to add a user preference setting to turn this checkbox on by
default, so frequent posters don't get frustrated.

Now, for readers, you should include the Creative Commons Some Rights
Reserved image, and maybe some text like the following:

        Posts on this board are released under the Creative Commons
        Attribution 2.0 license. For the purposes of the license, each
        post is a separate Work. You must give credit to each poster
        individually for the messages they post -- either with their
        real name, if provided, or with their pseudonym/nickname, such
        as "User X of Board Y". For anonymous posts, please credit
        "Anonymous user of Board Y."

You can simplify that considerably if your software doesn't allow
anonymous posts or real names or pseudonyms.

> Many thanks if you anyone can help me out

Sure. Thanks for doing some homework. A lot of people just stick the
Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved image on every page without
comment or explanation, which makes the content really hard to re-use.

~ESP

-- 
Evan Prodromou                  .O.
http://bad.dynu.ca/~evan/       ..O
evan at bad.dynu.ca                OOO
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