this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
103 points (96.4% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

28381 readers
3 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages πŸ”₯

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

Report contact

Donations πŸ’—

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Stackoverflow, and the rest of the SE network, explicitly says that all user-generated content is licensed under CC-BY-SA. (link here). So, while SE has the right to do whatever they want with user content, they have to attribute the users who made it, and they have to keep the same or similar open license on the content. I know users can't really fight a big company on equal footing, but an explicit license like that is an implicit commitment to respecting, at least to some degree, users' ownership of their content.

On the other hand, Reddit's user agreement includes this: "...you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content...." So, reddit asserts the right to use user content however it likes, with no rights to the users who generate it.

Recent events make me much more interested in knowing how the content I generate will be licensed. I know a cc license on Reddit content wouldn't change most of what makes the recent decisions so terrible, but it would give some standing to the people upset with how reddit plans to use what they've contributed.

I looked a bit, but didn't see an explicit statement about how the content in this server (lemmy.world) is licensed. (That's not a criticism; I think the admins have been busy with a few other things, and I really appreciate it!! I'm asking about this because I'm hoping to see more and more here.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

... explicit statement of open license would encourage some people that it’s worth putting their content here.

I suspect you'll find this is a double-edged sword. Open-licensing frameworks quite deliberately set out requirements for re-use, and are agnostic about who can do so. Many lemmings have strong feelings about who good actors and bad actors are, irrespective of whether they meet policy requirements. It's all fun and games until nazilemmy starts their own fediverse and seeds it with all our comments and posts as allowed by the open-license.

Personally, I'm a believer in policies that enable both usage you agree with and usage you disagree with on equal terms, but that's not a selling point to everyone in the lemmyverse. All rights reserved with a carve-out for lemmy to distribute offers less wiggle room for abuse (and use). I'm not real opinionated about terms, but I do agree more clarity would be useful.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That's a good point, but I think it's also another motivation to have some explicit statement of licensing: people who prefer a different license will know they should move to a different home instance.