Archive:Should authors share copyright with the Citizendium Foundation?

The issue

In addition to making their work available to Citizendium under the chosen license terms, should contributors also share copyright for their original contributions with Citizendium?

It needs to be stressed that this is not a request for copyright transfer. Authors retain copyright themselves but agree to grant it to the Citizendium Foundation as well.

Some relevant points:

• Contributors can only share copyright for their own original contributions, not material sourced from third parties such as (but not limited to) Wikipedia.
• Copyright is valuable, and authors are usually given something (not necessarily money) in return for sharing it, or granting lesser rights.
• Sharing copyright grants a lot of power to the Citizendium Foundation, which can be used in both positive and negative ways.

Affirmative: require copyright sharing

Argument: copyright sharing makes relicensing of content significantly easier

A copyright holder can release their material under any terms they wish. If at some point in the future it becomes desirable to switch licenses or release material under a different license, the Citizendium Foundation will be able to implement this decision instantly for the majority of content.

An example of why this is important can be seen in the Free Software community with the impending release of version 3 of the GNU General Public License. Various projects, in order to be certain of the licensing under which they will operate, have chosen to release their code strictly under GPL version 2, without the optional term that allows licensees to use software under the terms of later versions [1]. Unless there is a single individual or organisation holding copyright for the whole codebase, these projects will have to get the permission of all contributors in order to upgrade, and rewrite parts of the code whose authors did not grant such permission. The Linux kernel is the primary example of a project facing this dilemma as it licenses strictly under GPL v2 while copyright remains in the hands of individual contributors.

We cannot assume that one license will remain perpetually appropriate for Citizendium's purposes, nor can we assume that later upgrades of existing licenses will always meet the project's needs. Therefore, the project needs copyright to be shared to ensure it can fulfil its aims effectively in future.

Reply: The inclusion of material sourced from third parties raises significant practical difficulties

Whichever license we pick from those on option, there will be a substantial amount of material already in existence released under compatible terms. We can use this under the given license but cannot share copyright. It is highly unlikely we will not wish to make use of this material, and given the potential size of Citizendium, it will only take a small percentage of material to be obtained from such sources to present us with a significant stumbling block to the swift license upgrades envisioned above.

Citizendium already has a mechanism in place for tracking material from a major third-party source, Wikipedia. We will need to extend this to tracking all third-party-sourced work, and will need to have the ability to, in any given article, separate out the third-party material from the original contributions. A worst-case scenario would see a large percentage of articles containing material from a third-party — difficult to track and a huge amount of work to rewrite, and in practice restricting license-switching ability no less effectively than a regime without any copyright sharing.

Negative: do not require copyright sharing

Argument: people are wary of giving copyright to others even for money, requesting it will reduce the number of willing contributors

A rule almost universally cited to prospective authors is: NEVER GIVE UP YOUR COPYRIGHT! [2] Although Citizendium would ask for copyright to be shared, not surrendered, the desire among authors not to grant copyright privileges to others is strong and people are likely to be discouraged from contributing if we require this. In the free software community it has been noted that projects requiring sharing or transfer of copyright may dissuade contributors in this way [3].

In some cases individuals may have job restrictions that prevent them sharing copyright but which will not prevent them licensing their work. An analogous situation certainly arises in respect to software [4].