A fascinating license question

[Stephen Ewen]

In response to Larry: Yes. Even democratic governments can and do go bad.

And you'd rather some body of stockholders in which you have no say whatsover make these choices for you??

[Nereo Preto]

Just to be clear from the beginning: yes, I believe we should release our content for all uses, including commercial uses.
Attribution of course is a must (question: will we be able to enforce this point, i.e., make the guy who "forgets" attribution in a commercial use cry very loud and pay tons of money?).

And here's some reasons:

1) In principle, there is not bad or good use. It is not a matter of fact that commercial use will be, e.g., contrary to human rights while non-commercial uses of CZ contents will all be humanitarian. There is not, thus, some idealistic distinction between commercial and non-commercial use in my view.

2) If CZ is getting tons of cash for those contents I am contributing to create, I want a slice of the cake. Here, "I" is the average contributor, including myself. I actually get paid to produce contents (in my current job). If CZ asks money for the commercial use of its contents, this becomes my second job - it is reasonable "I" want to be paid for it.

Now you'll probably say, well, others will get the money CZ is not getting.
I'm not totally sure about that. How could any company earn from contents which are open to everyone? If company A does this, why companies B-Z don't do the same? The answer may be: they didn't have the idea. But then I say, well, company A is doing money not from our content - which is free - but from their original idea.
And, let's say CZ becomes a great deal for company A. Isn't that great for us too? Let's say we face a crisis - e.g. we don't have money to run the servers. What company A may do then? I say, they'll pay for the servers.

But note, I don't understand much about economy, so I may largely wrong. However,I'm suspicious about a license that makes differences between different uses. I just want our contents to be as much available as possible. As long as attribution is guaranteed. This is the core point for me.

[Stephen Ewen]

The money that gets paid to Citizendium for licensing fees has to go somewhere, after all.

Yes, into development of the project rather than development of a company's wealth.

[Larry Sanger]

The output of the community is its intellectual property.  You want Citizendium to control who can and can't use that intellectual property for profit.  I assume it will not behave fairly because I've never seen such a system behave fairly, and I've seen lots of such systems behave unfairly.  To my mind, collective control of community output should be kept to a bare minimum.  Allowing even democratically elected officials to determine who can and who cannot use content which I have created is unacceptable.

I have not declared a view, Anthony, to anyone; I am trying to get a vigorous debate going.

You say (wrongly) that I want CZ to control who can and can't use CZ's content for profit.  But that isn't the issue I'm asking you to evaluate.  The issue isn't whether someone controls who uses CZ's content, but rather, whether CZ will be compensated for its use.  Suppose we establish a policy that allows anyone whatsoever to use it to make a profit, if they pay the fees.

[Larry Sanger]

2) If CZ is getting tons of cash for those contents I am contributing to create, I want a slice of the cake. Here, "I" is the average contributor, including myself. I actually get paid to produce contents (in my current job). If CZ asks money for the commercial use of its contents, this becomes my second job - it is reasonable "I" want to be paid for it.

Wait a moment.  Consider what CZ is--a non-profit for which you are a volunteer, which is plowing all money it receives into the organization of the project.  You're saying that you don't want a slice of the cake if General Electric uses your content, but you do want a slice if the CZ Foundation uses it?

I'm baffled.

[Chris Day]

As I understand the patent law, from a scientific perspective, patented discoveries can be used for basic research in labs for no fee. Here is an example, companies that want to make (for their own use) or sell, the heat resistant enzyme required for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) must pay for the licence. However, in our labs we can make it for ourselves and it is legal. What is the CZ license that is similar to that? Basically, any professional has to buy a licence but anyone else can use it for free. (sorry for being ut of the loop on the licence issues, I guess it does not interest me too much, although it probably should.)

Another thought I have is what are the chances the companies would actually pay for such a licence, rather than just paraphrase the content? Maybe this whole discussion is moot?

[Larry Sanger]

Another thought I have is what are the chances the companies would actually pay for such a licence, rather than just paraphrase the content? Maybe this whole discussion is moot?

They pay for licenses for all sorts of other content, so why not CZ's?

[Martin Baldwin-Edwards]

There is a lot of emotional and muddled thinking in this exchange, in my opinion. First, there is the issue of enforceability of law. If CZ takes a licence which prohibits commercial use without attribution, and some big corporation ignores that: what will CZ do? Without sufficent finances, legal action [in the USA or elsewhere] is out of the question. So, basically, such a licence plays into the hands of big business if they should wish to take advantage of it.

The second point is about the continued viability of CZ. It should be clear to anyone with knowledge of the real world that living off donations is a ridiculous and unreliable survival strategy if you can earn money from the product. This is all that we are talking about. Possibly, separate from the licence issues, there will need to be some constraints on possible income: how it can be used, etc. The principal objective should be to finance CZ and not to give large amounts of money to any individual or employee.

Thirdly, I am not impressed by specious arguments that systems do not behave fairly. It is ridiculous, like claiming that democracy is a bad idea because there are serious problems with it [which there are].

Finally, from the point of view of individiual contributors who will probably not make any money from this under any conditions, is it preferable to use the potential gains from CZ to finance the Editor-in-Chief, some other admin, and overhead costs etc., OR, to add to the excess profits of other unrelated businesses. For the life of me, I cannot imagine where any doubt comes over this!

[Stephen Ewen]

Another thought I have is what are the chances the companies would actually pay for such a licence, rather than just paraphrase the content? Maybe this whole discussion is moot?

Chances are fantastically good if the fees to use it outright are less than the cost of hiring a small army to rewrite it all.

[Andrew Yates]

I'm one of the people that returned after receiving the mass email a week or two ago, so I don't claim to be a huge contributor (at the moment) or to be intimately familiar with the project.

That said, the appeal of Wikipedia and Citizendium to me is that the information is freely available to all (under a license that requires attribution, of course), including large companies that may wish to use it.

[Larry Sanger]

That said, the appeal of Wikipedia and Citizendium to me is that the information is freely available to all (under a license that requires attribution, of course), including large companies that may wish to use it.

Every opinion is useful, Andrew, thanks for (re)joining.

"Freely available to all" is, however, ambiguous.  It's of course freely available to read; under a noncommercial license, it would be freely available to all noncommercial reuse and redevelopment, which enables another (non-profit) project to fork our content under the same license.  The question is whether, in addition to these crucial, important freedoms, we should insist that it be free to everyone to use commercially.

[Geoffrey Plourde]

I support a copycenter license, as opposed to a copyright copyleft license, with some minor modifications requiring payment if wholesale portions copied. A example of what I am thinking of is http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Copyright, although tweaking would be needed.

(COI Disclaimer:I was one of the principal authors of that policy)

[Chris Day]

Here are some more random thoughts:

If companies are willing to buy a licence, and apparently they are for other services, and this helps run the administration of the CZ project, including programmers to develop our interface concepts properly, then i think i am shifting towards liking the idea of a licencing option for commercial enterprises.

Given that, will this help us or not with respect to recruiting authors?  Thinking about this more, I believe it could since authors will feel that their work, as well as being freely accessable to anyone, will be helping run the project. We may scare off authors who are against any form of licencing.  i have no feel for such numbers though so it is hard for me to assess objectively.

[Anthony_DiPierro]

The money that gets paid to Citizendium for licensing fees has to go somewhere, after all.

Yes, into development of the project rather than development of a company's wealth.

When Citizendium pays people to develop the project, that money is going to go to a company (or individual's) wealth, be it the hosting providers or the lawyers or the travel agents or the software engineers or whatever it is the money is spent on.  Sure, these people/companies will be adding value, but so will any successful reusers of CZ content.

[Larry Sanger]

All, I have to get my nose to the grindstone actually producing the paper that will justify (and help me decide about) my position on our license.  I'm going to be "heads down" until Friday.  I will (silently) be reading here, though.