[JoPP-Public] DOAJ: PDF and CC?

Fri Oct 28 09:11:49 CEST 2016

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 04:37:40AM +0000, Mathieu ONeil wrote:
> PDFs would feature this text:
> 
> "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> 
> Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License"
> 
> Now the only indication we have about copyright is "All the contents
> of this journal are in the public domain" (on the front page) which is
> a bit vague.
> 
> So should we change this text to the CC licence? Any reason not to?

I, for one thing, would object to that change on the basis that the
mentioned license is *not* a Free Culture licenses (not all CC licenses
are; see https://creativecommons.org/freeworks ). If we want to go to
for CC license, we should go for something like CC BY (AKA
"attribution"), and specifically avoid any "non commercial" or "non
derivative" variant.

While we are at it, version 4.0 of the CC licenses are generally much
better than 3.0 that are suggested above.

Finally, it is actually not true that "public domain" is a vague
formulation, but it is true that it might not be appropriate for JOPP,
because most europeans, and others, will not be allowed to put their
works in "real" public domain (in several countries around the world you
cannot waive moral rights). The closest approximation to that we can go
for is CC0: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ , which
waives all waivable rights, and fallbacks to a very broad public license
where that is not possible.

Sorry for the license lawyering :-), but this kind of choices will have
an impact on our target public in free culture/free software circles, so
we should think carefully about them.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli . zack at upsilon.cc . upsilon.cc/zack . . o . . . o . o
Computer Science Professor . CTO Software Heritage . . . . . o . . . o o
Former Debian Project Leader . OSI Board Director  . . . o o o . . . o .
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