Suggestion
We are currently using the Creative Commons license (BY-NC) in version 2.5. This version has been published in 2005, updated to version 3.0 in 2007, and will apparently be updated to version 4.0 in the coming weeks. Once this has happened, I will suggest updating our license policies to refer to the most recent version.
This is possible, because the various BY-NC licenses are compatible with each other. Basically, what the updated policy page would state is that all content added to our database prior to some date (to be determined) is published under the v2.5 license, and all new content or derivative works added to our database on or after that date are considered to be published under the v4.0 license.
After reading the explanation of changes between v2.5 and v3.0 ([1]) as well as suggested changes from v3.0 to v4.0 ([2]), I see nothing in those changes which would affect us negatively. The positive effects can be read on those pages as well. I would like to invite everyone to have a thorough look at these suggested changes and discussion pages - and check out if the suggested version change would be OK for us. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 13:05, September 23, 2013 (UTC)
Suggested changes
There are tons of links going directly to our copy of the legal code directly (currently located at Memory Alpha:Creative Commons License), so to keep changes at a minimum, I suggest the following:
- Keep Memory Alpha:Copyrights basically unchanged by just removing the version number from all links to Memory Alpha:Creative Commons License (complete)
- Check all other links to that page and remove version numbers there as well (complete)
- Copy the actual license legal code to Memory Alpha:Creative Commons License/2.5 (Note: This should really be a manual copy of the content, not a page move. Reason for this is that, in this case, the change history of the various license versions stays in one place! -- complete. and done this way before I saw this)
- Copy the new license legal code to Memory Alpha:Creative Commons License/4.0
- Replace the content on Memory Alpha:Creative Commons License with the following bullet points:
- All article revisions added to Memory Alpha before CHANGEDATE are considered to be released under version 2.5 of the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license (CC-BY-NC 2.5), or an earlier version of said license if added to Memory Alpha before November 3, 2005.
- All article revisions added to Memory Alpha on or after CHANGEDATE are considered to be released under version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license (CC-BY-NC 4.0). If this revision is a "derivative work" of an article revision that was added before CHANGEDATE, it is considered to be re-licensed from its previous license to CC-BY-NC 4.0 unless the prior license expressly disallows such re-licensing. In this case, the new article revision is licensed under the same license as the previous revision.
- In case of differences between two or more involved versions of the CC-BY-NC license, licensees need to comply with the more restrictive wording.
Discussion
I've already taken a quick peek at this stuff and have no issue with that path being taken. -- sulfur (talk) 13:43, September 23, 2013 (UTC)
- Is this related to this issue? 31dot (talk) 21:27, September 23, 2013 (UTC)
- I found out that the 4.0 licenses are about to be released while checking stuff for that other discussion, but otherwise no, this suggestion neither solves nor makes worse the other issue. There apparently has been a discussion about clarifying whether ads next to content are commercial (or non-commercial) use, but the final license doesn't seem to contain any of that. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 21:45, September 23, 2013 (UTC)
Note that for the ccl-sa license style, we still have to really discern between 2.5 and newer ones, as the links go to different places on the CC site. As such, I suspect that we'll have to update all of those images to use the appropriate license link, and all new ones will fall under the 4.0 (as in, we can update the licensing template appropriately at that time. -- sulfur (talk) 13:06, September 24, 2013 (UTC)