creative commons licence implementation

[Ben Toner]

Hi Aram

This is an annoying detail but it seems important to get correct since we have big plans for SciRate. I want to add an extremely minimal Terms of Service (ToS) along the lines of the following:

You grant Scirate a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License on any content that you contribute. You state that you have the right to grant this license.

We could either just use this and expand to a more complete ToS when that seems necessary, or we could just minimally modify someone else's Terms to include this. All the other stuff doesn't really matter right now, but getting a proper license for the comments is hard to fix retroactively.

The problem is that Scirate is not a legal entity, so (i) it can't be granted a license, and (ii) it can't enter into contracts like a ToS anyway. Maybe there's a way to avoid this, but you'd have to ask a lawyer. Otherwise the ToS needs be an agreement between the user and either (i) you, (ii) us, (iii) some SciRate entity that we create, or (iv) some other entity.

Wanted to explain the issue, so you can decide. Here's a solution that takes no effort by you: happy for it to be us for now (I would need a less-minimal ToS though) and we could spin it out into a separate organization at some point in the future.

Cheers,

ben

Ben Toner

Founder & CEO, Draftable Pty Ltd

Phone: +61 412 996 288

http://bentoner.com  http://draftable.com 

[aram harrow]

Hi Ben (cc'ing also Jonathan who I think knows a lot about these topics),

I thought that the CC licenses were not granted to an entity like Scirate, but were just declared for a piece of work

So what about the following:

1. in the TOS, write

"By posting data to Scirate (scites, comments or other data), you agree to grant a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License for any content that you contribute. You state that you have the right to grant this license."

2. On the page where people are commenting, we should also have at least a link to the TOS, and probably better would be to also mention the CC license.  Even stronger, but somewhat inelegant, would be to add a checkbox saying "I agree with the TOS" or to make the "submit" box say "submit comment and agree to terms of service".

Your thoughts?

aram

[Ben Toner]

That sounds fine, but there's still the problem that usually a ToS is an agreement between the entity providing the service and the people using it. Can you have an agreement between a User and no one? It's sort of a backwards unilateral contract, if that's a thing. If Jonathan doesn't know, perhaps one of you can ask a lawyer friend, because I've been bothering my lawyer friends enough with business and Effective Altruism stuff.

2. It'll be linked in the footer on the page people make comments in. Maybe we can just put the cc logo in the footer too. We can put links next to the comment box, but I'd be concerned that they'll get in the way.

Ben Toner

Founder & CEO, Draftable Pty Ltd

Phone: +61 412 996 288

http://bentoner.com  http://draftable.com 

[Ben Toner]

Maybe a ToS would just get interpreted as an agreement between the User and the union of individuals running scirate, whomsoever they be, so it'd be okay.

Ben Toner

Founder & CEO, Draftable Pty Ltd

Phone: +61 412 996 288

http://bentoner.com  http://draftable.com