If you want this post to be discussion about the copyright status of posts on LW, then you should change the title. I expect that a lot of people who would be interested in commenting on that issue might skip over this post because the title gives no indication of the actual topic.
You obviously cannot retroactively change the copyright status of already published posts without the express consent of their authors, but I'd support a move to add a text saying "by pressing submit, you agree to license your post under [some CC license]" to the submission form. Or possibly an option to choose under which license you wish to publish your post, though that would more work for the site programmers.
Also, I hereby declare all of my past and future posts on Less Wrong to be licensed under CC-BY. EDIT: No wait, I can't make such a declaration, because part of my posts are written for MIRI, who owns the copyrights according to the work-for-hire clause in my contract. I'll try to mark these posts somehow, but ask me if you want to be sure.
I just want to draw attention to the following bit of Kaj's comment, which seems like it should be really obvious but Rick's original post seems to indicate wasn't obvious to him:
You obviously cannot retroactively change the copyright status of already published posts without the express consent of their authors
You can "propose [] that all content on the site be subject to the [CC-BY] license", but you can't actually bring that state of affairs about.
All of my original work offsite (I can't do it with my fanfic and have never thought about it for my LW posts, which I always assumed would remain under regular copyright by default) is under CC-BY-NC-SA. I'm happy to formally extend that to my LW posts, but I imagine Castify would find that unsatisfactory/unusable. I'm actually really uncomfortable with people making money off things I wrote without working out a deal with me. It certainly doesn't help that I'm kinda averse to audio content and don't want to check Castify's work to see if it's something I'm happy to have associated with me with this extra level of sorta-endorsement (extending a less restrictive license to the content that happens to interest them).
I'm comfortable with CC-BY, but I would rather it be CC-BY-SA with the SA condition waived for LW's media partners.
Are you looking at CC-BY-SA or CC-BY? I've never written a promoted post, but for what it's worth, I'd be pretty comfortable with my posts being licensed under the former -- which is also used for Wikipedia contributions -- but not so much for the latter.
We can't do CC-BY-SA because we'd have to use the same license, which would allow others to use the audio we've created outside of the Castify service.
That's an excuse. You can use the license. You just don't want to do so. As you are making money out of the creative work of other people, why exactly shouldn't you get away with not allowing others to reuse your content?
I guess I should have inserted in there that "We can't run a business and do CC-BY-SA". Of course we could use that license but then everyone would just share the recordings for free.
We are not trying to be greedy we just want to build a viable business that provides a valuable service. If you see a clever way to do that and still use the CC-BY-SA license then please let us know. We are still new and are willing to consider different business models.
Experiment proposal: Use CC-BY-SA for some recordings, and other licences for other recordings. A year later, measure how many copies of which recordings are available on internet. (I don't recommend it seriously, but I would actually like to see the results.)
Hypothetically, would it be too big problem for you to use different licenses for audios of different articles, based on how the article author feels about this topic? Yes, your competitors could legally take some of your audios, but not all of them... so their satisfied customers would then come to you for the rest. Depending on numbers, the gains could outweigh the losses.
It's 2012.
This argument has happened over and over again for the past 20+ years.
We all know how it turns out.
If you want to set the terms, you pay the creators.
Actually, whatever license you use, your content will be copied around.
If you use a proprietary license after taking CC-BY core content, copying your content will be less legal and less immoral.
This is "crowdsourcing" in the pejorative sense: a cloud of "suckers", all arrows pointing to "you" in the middle.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others' work, for no benefit to them.
You really, really can't make a business except by proprietising contributions to a commons? The word for that is "parasite". You really can't?
Edit: The image I was thinking of, originally by Evan Prodromou (founder of WikiTravel) (here under CC-by 2.5 Canada):
The post the image is from is well worth reading, as are its comments, if you have a business plan that involves others doing the content creation unpaid.
You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others' work, for no benefit to them.
While I'm in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, "no benefit" isn't exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they're taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That's work that benefits me.
It'd be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.
This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn't hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no 'ick' reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they're entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.
I'm not interested in anything I write being copied and redistributed in a way that does not permit the recipient to copy it further.
Also, y'all don't care for podcast purposes, but Cards Against Rationality is implicitly CC-BY-NC-SA since it inherits from Cards Against Humanity.
In response to some of the comments here and as a bit of an experiment, we've made The Simple Truth mini audiobook available with a CC-BY-SA license. Enjoy and share alike.
You can't retrospectively relicence past contributions without explicit permission of the authors, but you can explicitly require a certain licence going forward.
(This sort of thing is why relicencing an open source project is a major goddamn pain in the backside, and why thinking really hard about it ahead of time is a good idea.)
"You agree to release your work under licence X or future versions of licence X as approved by organisation Y" is pretty common, and hasn't been seriously challenged (even when people whine about it, e.g. Wikipedia using the CC-by-sa provision of GFDL 1.3).
(Turns out that Stallman and Moglen knew what they were doing when they invented copyleft.)
Stallman is a socially grating smelly geek of little personal charm who's spent nearly thirty years consistently being pretty much completely right, and utterly uncompromising about it. This is, of course, unforgivable.
Rot13'd to sortof comply with your request.
Vg'f abg whfg cenvfr, vg'f na rkcynangvba bs fubxjnir'f bofreingvbaf.
Fubxjnir fnlf "guvf vf fhecevfvatyl fnar, tvira EZF'f erchgngvba". Qnivq rkcynvaf "EZF'f erchgngvba" naq gur "fhecevfvat fnavgl" ol cbvagvat bhg gung ur'f orra boabkvbhfyl gryyvat na vapbairavrag gehgu sbe n ybat gvzr, jurer "boabkvbhf" rffragvnyyl erqhprf gb "hasyvapuvatyl cevapvcyrq va na naablvat jnl, arpxorneqrq, trrxl".
Gur snpg gung ur vf n arpxorneq vf eryrinag gb nal qvfphffvba bs uvf erchgngvba.
LessWrong and Castify want feedback from the community before moving forward. Thoughts?
Who is "LessWrong", referring to, in this sentence? I usually understand it to mean the community, or the website, neither of which applies in this case... Would it be the owners, either the Trike Apps people or Eliezer and other SIAI / CFAR folk?
I haven't written many posts here but for the record, I don't wish anything I have written or will write to be protected by a licence which restricts free propagation.
What we propose is that all content on the site be subject to the Creative Commons license which would allow content posted to LessWrong to be used for commercial use as long as the work is given proper attribution.
Aye.
Most objections that come up could be dealt with by making this the default and allowing authors an opt-out clause. For instance, someone who wants to post excerpts from a paper or book that they plan to publish under different terms.
Along similar lines, another potential problem is posts that contain quotes from other works; quoting is "fair use" but I'm not sure this still applies to a reading of the quoted material.
I like the /. approach to user content. Castify, of course, would prefer the license that is of maximal benefit to them. It seems to me that it would not be too difficult to explicitly ask the few people who have something to say that is worth recording.
So we've talked through the implications of having some posts under the CC-BY-SA licence and others under the CC-BY license and we think we could incorporate both into a single podcast feed as Viliam_Bur suggested.
If you've been following the announced partnership between LessWrong and Castify, you'll know that we would like to start offering the promoted posts as a podcast.
So far, everything offered by Castify is authored by Eliezer Yudkowsky who gave permission to have his content used. Because promoted posts can be written by those who haven't explicitly given us permission, we're reluctant to offer them without first working through the licensing issues with the community.
What we propose is that all content on the site be subject to the Creative Commons license which would allow content posted to LessWrong to be used for commercial use as long as the work is given proper attribution.
LessWrong management and Castify want feedback from the community before moving forward. Thoughts?
Edit: EricHerboso was kind enough to start a poll in the comments here.