Currently there's a big controversy over SE changing the licensing from CC 3.0 to CC 4.0. Regardless of whether this change was legally solid or not, could someone provide a specific example of how this licensing ambiguity affects our ability to copy, share and reuse content published on SE in th...
I wouldn't take "Whoever wrote the code couldn't suddenly claim that the licensing change completely revoked their original CC attribution" as granted. If SE is distributing 3.0 content under some other license (e.g. 4.0), that's a breach of section 4.a, in which case section 7.a says the license is automatically terminated.
I basically see it the same as you, but IANAL and there is at least one alternative interpretation that posits publishing CC-BY-SA 3 content under CC-BY-SA 4 would be trouble. Of course you can check the post's creation date (or is it last modification date?) to determine the one to use, but that would not be optimal.
@manveti sure, but SE's actions cannot revoke formerly granted licensing rights. People who published their content under CC SA 3.0 granted the rights to reuse it to the whole world, in perpetuity, regardless of what ends up happening to SE later.
@FrédéricHamidi is it actually a copyright violation to just reference CC BY SA, without mentioning an exact version? Or to reference the wrong version? After all, attribution has been properly provided, so how could someone sue for copyright violation?
Again, IANAL, but since they are different licences it would make sense to have to explicitly specify the version of the licence that grants you the right to publish the content. I'm also not sure that something like published under CC-BY-SA 3 or maybe 4 would help. Has anyone tried asking on Law?
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica IANAL, but my reading is that CC BY-SA 3.0 isn't granted to the whole world, but rather to all recipients of works distributed under that license, recursively (i.e. you give it to SE, now SE has a license; I read it from SE, now I have a license). If SE doesn't have a license anymore, the terms that grant that license to their recipients don't apply, so we don't have a license anymore either (unless we got the work before the license was terminated).
@manveti SE regularly publishes data dumps licensed under CC SA 3.0. Therefore the content is distributed to the whole world regardless of what happens to the main site.
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica Sure. If you grab it from there (hopefully via some 3rd party whose license isn't in jeopardy), where it's explicitly 3.0-licensed, then you can just explicitly mark yours as 3.0 and be fine.
@Jonathan, I would like to repost your question on Law. It would be quoted and attribution would be provided with links to your MSE profile and this question. Would you be okay with that?
On behalf of someone who is a complete dumbass where coding and programming is concerned, I thank you for writing a clear simple question, because I have never really understood the quarrel about the new licensing, only that most users saw the change as being illegal.
@Mari-LouA My concern is that if they get away with this, what's stopping them from changing to any other license that could have significantly different provisions?
"Note that I'm not interested in whether or not the licensing change was legal/moral/appropriate/cool. I'm merely asking about how it affects my rights to reuse content posted on SE." But the legality of the change does affect your rights to reuse the content.
@Trilarion sure and how exactly does it affect them? I'm not here to argue if it's legal or not, I'm here to ask if it being illegal or not has any practical consequences for anyone outside of SE.
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica Yes, it has practical consequences (for one CC-BY-SA is not backward compatible, so it cannot be the same), but all I want to say is that these consequences depend on the change being legal or not. I fully understand your question though.
You're also missing the point that the practical outcome is not the crux of the issue. The principle of the thing should not be ignored. Why not? Because it sets a horrendous, horrendous precedent. This is literally the entire point of licence agreements. You cannot, cannot, cannot just decide that an agreement you once entered into is now some other agreement. How is this not completely, undeniably, totally obvious? We cannot let a corporation just do that. How do people not understand this. A company that doesn't understand licences has no business running a tech site. Period.
@LightnessRaceswithMonica so you're saying that while there are zero practical consequences at the moment, we should watch out in case SE decides to, say, change the license from CC SA to full copyright? If so, please add it as an answer
@Light, $DEITY knows I agree with you, but note that [the questioner is] not interested in whether or not the licensing change was legal/moral/appropriate/cool. This is about possibly immediate or short-term technical impact on code bases, not... the other things.
@FrédéricHamidi I understand that (and I'm glad somebody asked it). I didn't write an answer. I was referring to some of the more generally bemused commenters... and, I concede, venting a little ;)
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica Not as such. I'm just wildly annoyed by their behaviour. After a decade of providing free contributions that they make money off, they're slapping us in the face with a clear statement that they can't even bring themselves to abide by the agreement under which we provided those contributions. It doesn't get much ruder than that. It's an abhorrent way to treat your volunteer suppliers. Welcoming, indeed!
This entire question hangs on whether the change was in fact legal, which is still unresolved. I started a GoFundMe to pursue it in court or arbitration — you simply can't ask this question while disregarding the potential legal challenge. If it's legal, there are some practical changes. If it's illegal, technically nothing changed to an external user.
@LightnessRaceswithMonica Help me understand You cannot, cannot, cannot just decide that an agreement you once entered into is now some other agreement. I have had several telephone and electricity contracts in the past, wherein there is a clause which says the company has the right to change or modify the conditions of the contract when it fits them. I think there's a minimum time limit and you, the consumer, has to be informed. 1/2
Well, what happens is (in Italy at least) you end up spending more on bills, regardless of the initial deal. Why isn't it the same here on SE? Users have consented to cc-sa-3.0, the company updates the license, and informs the "consumers" if they stay quiet that means they have given their consent. Everything is now covered by the new license? 2/2
@Mari-LouA because this has to be in the initial license to be valid and they usually must provide you a way to cancel the contract if you don't agree, Your electricity company can't tell you "From now on you pay 80% of your income each month to us and you can't cancel this contract ever!". If Stack Exchange would show a popup/send a mail to each user, ask them if they agree to license everything they contributed as CC BY-SA 4.0 and keep posts of users which don't agree as 3.0 or delete them there wouldn't be a problem.
@Mari-LouA Then that is part of the contract. That is not what happened here. Also note that the sort of clause you're talking about is... not always accepted by the courts.
@Josef If Stack Exchange would show a popup/send a mail to each user It sounds perfectly reasonable until you realise we're talking of millions of users, worldwide. And what about those users who posted two or three times, 5-11 years ago? Would they all have to be notified?
Exactly; that's why it's untenable to change the licence now even if they'd tried to do it properly. They should have put in place a technological solution to mark older content with the licence under which it was posted, then moved forward with a community proposal to licence new content under 4.0. I can't imagine anyone would have had a problem with that. They simply took a shortcut, stamping all over our rights in the process, after everything we've done for them. Charming...
@LightnessRaces then moved forward with a community proposal to licence new content under 4.0. You mean make an announcement on Meta and on SO Meta, and then take a ballot? What about the millions of users who left SO/SE, who don't know or care about meta? Could a tiny minority of SE users, most of whom are not moderators and as a result do not represent anyone but themselves, make that kind decision on behalf of millions?
@Mari-LouA SE could also change their contract to say "we can relicense your content as much as we please" and then finalize the license transition. IMO they could even do it right now to end the whole debacle.
@LightnessRaces I don't know or understand enough in order to replicate with any imaginable level of competence. I'll just back off, quietly, but I understand the issues better now, so thank you.
@josef IMO that's an open question given how their license terms are worded. Let's see what the legal challenge turns up, if there's ever one in practice.
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica It's doubtful to me that a contract can give a non-copyright holder the ability to relicense content under US copyright law. I can't find anything definitive on that point, but licensing itself isn't in the list of licensable rights in section 106 of the copyright act.
The closest thing I've seen is for the original copyright owner to license something permissively and then the owner of a derivative work to license the derivative work more restrictively.
@JonathanReezSupportsMonica The United States Supreme Court explicitly rejected the "sweat of the brow" theory of copyright, so the commas would have to be added by a human and convincingly evince a "modicum of creativity" in order for the derivative work to be copyrightable and licensed separately.
And that's just the first bar they'd have to pass if it came to legal proceedings. US courts generally are not sympathetic to making minor, unimportant changes in order to use copyright law to do something you couldn't do otherwise. See Feist v. Urban
US copyright law doesn't seem to allow a copyright owner to give a non-owner the right to relicense the copyrighted work. If SE isn't allowed to do it, it's not allowed to do it through a contract.
