[d@DCC] Creativity and cultural policy (Was: Re: [CPI-UA] Cross

[Russell McOrmond]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Wallace J.McLean wrote:

> I'd like to read your posting. Do you I have your permission? ;)


  Don't even joke about that.  I've had a sometimes frustrating
conversation in the FLORA.org helpdesk about a new "terms of use" policy I
am trying to put in place by mid-summer.  One of the more controversial 
sections is a copyright clarification requiring that documents be licensed 
in some Creative Commons license (license is choice of site maintainer) 
and that any postings to mailing lists be assumed to be in a specific 
license unless otherwise noted.

  http://www.flora.org/flora/legal.shtml

  Even though I have been assuming that documents and messages published
via FLORA.org had permission from their contributors similar to a creative
Commons license (Probably Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial was the 
safest to assume), but I ended up finding out that this was not the case.  
I have had people frustrated by what they perceive me as "taking away" 
rights or imposing things on people when all I wanted to do was clarify by 
documenting on pages via a copyright notice what I had always thought was 
the case.


  As a site administrator I have to assume a Creative Commons type license 
given the messages are republished in multiple formats, available to 
various indexes and archives, and so-on.  If anyone posting to a mailing 
list thought they had more control than that then they had better 
"wake up and smell the decaf".

  I worry that there may be some confusion around this forum as no "terms
of use" document exists and people submitting messages could have any
number of weird assumptions about their messages.

-- 
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> 
 "Make it legal: don't litigate, use creative licensing" campaign.
 A modern answer to P2P: http://www.flora.ca/makelegal200403.shtml
 Canadian File-sharing Legal Information Network http://www.canfli.org/


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