Clarify Copyright status of content on Drupal.org's website.

moving this to webmasters.

as a side note, handbooks do have a creative commons licensing on the bottom of the http://drupal.org/handbooks page.

Changing the title and category, as this seems to be an important issue but not a "bug".

One common statement might be that "All content copyright 2001-2008 by their respective authors, licensed under the Creative Commons Lincense...." That would cover individuals, while giving clear license to the Drupal community (and/or Drupal Association) to use anything on Drupal.org. (I would recommend use of the Legal module as well, but that really would be a different issue.)

I will bring this up with the Association.

Every page in the handbook has a block on the lower left corner with this text and has had this text since 2004 at least, this has not changed. The license statement is linked to this page in the handbooks.

All content is licensed Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike2.0 with these qualifications.

* the license is included with all copies or redistributions.
* the Drupal handbook is attributed as the originating document.

The /handbooks page itself does not have that link. I will update it this weekend with some other maintenance.

Wonder about the rest of the site, though. Forums, for example. Is there a need/interest in clarifying the status of that content?

Forums would be a separate issue and we've never had a copyright statement on them. Someone would have to investigate and decide what, if any, statement they'd want to make. I am not sure I recall any copyright statements on other, non-corporate site myself but at a wild unsubstantiated, no research guess would probably fall somewhere in the 'public speech arena.

http://drupal.org/node/14307

Also in the footer on http://drupal.org/handbooks:

Each handbook is © copyright 2000-2007 by the individual contributors and can be used in accordance with the Creative Commons License, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.

Thanks, GreenJelly. I have to agree -- something should be said about any copyright and/or license status (or lack thereof) for all the non-handbooks part of the site, and a TOS is not a bad idea either. There's text in the footer about the Drupal trademark.

I think GreenJelly's talking about the forum pages. However, I don't like his proposed solution. Offering over 240,000 users the chance to remove their content would be alarmist, confusing, chaotic, and could possibly leave the site in rambles. And telling them that d.o "owns" their content would be outrageous in my view. I don't know who his lawyer is, but I'm sure there are hundreds of lawyers who are registered users here who might have a differing opinion.

Although I'm not a lawyer myself, this personally seems like pretty much a non-issue to me. I really doubt, especially considering the notice on the handbooks pages, that if we add a similar statement to the rest of the page, that anyone would be too terribly upset. And if they are, they can take it up on a case-by-case basis.

However, there are people with more knowledge (and more interest) in the matter than myself, who could be consulted as well.

Aaron Winborn

aaron, I agree about the totality of the lawyer's advice. For example, the removal of content may violate the laws of some countries.

However, now that the Drupal Association exists and things are becoming more professional, which is inevitable with money entering the equation, simply being clear about the status of all content on the site doesn't strike me as a particularly odious or onerous thing for us to do, and in fact seems advisable, if only to avoid potential claims of liability down the line. Does each person retain copyright of their posts, and if so how is it licensed? If not, then that should be clear, too, imho. What about copyright infringement claims? Who's responsible there? Who's vulnerable there?

With the kind of traffic and activity this site receives, with new people joining in every day, leaving it vague and fuzzy just seems to be an invitation for unnecessary confusion and/or conflict down the line.

We do not remove content as a general rule. We are not a corporate site.

Adding a copyright notice elsewhere is odd and out of sync with the history of the community and this issue. People's opinions are pretty much their own, we don't own them. Lawyers are paid to be cautious.

In any case adding a copyright is outside the scope of this original issue, which is the handbook.

Actually, the way I read it, the original scope of this issue is the entire website, not just the handbook.

"People's opinions are pretty much their own, we don't own them."

I don't understand why we would not want to clarify that. It's not at all obvious or apparent from being mute on the subject. This isn't about lawyers, it's about stating a policy, whatever it may be. There already is a policy regarding the handbooks. Why not extend it to the entire website?

I read the issue as specific to documentation.

also, if we are going to make a dramatic declaration of rights to forum posts which we have not put forward before now, then I suggest that a survey of other open source projects be done first. Just saying we are going to do it will create a bit of a firestorm within the community.

+1 on moving cautiously
+1 on survey

Speaking for myself, I would not suggest claiming copyright of anyone's posts. My own preference would be to state that people retain their own copyright, but grant Drupal.org nonexclusive license to use and re-use. (Re-use might include moving forum posts to handbooks, which are covered by CC, for example.)

I've talked to GJ on IRC about this and Laura is right; it's about the whole site, not just the handbooks, which are already clearly labeled.

I must admit, I never really thought about it before he brought it up. Having a TOS/license statement isn't a bad idea. But, yeah, we do need to move cautiously and not rush to get something there just for the sake of having it. This community can be very volitile and I'd hate to see a massive blowup over this.

Michelle

One more bit of research:

===========

The Plone^® CMS — Open Source Content Management System is Copyright © 2000-2008 by the Plone Foundation et al.

Plone^® and the Plone logo are registered trademarks of the Plone Foundation.

Distributed under the GNU GPL license.

For any issues with the web site functionality, please file a ticket.

Please consult the policy on plone.org content if you want your content published on this site.

===========

At http://plone.org/about/publishing-content-on-plone.org/ they have a lot of rules that we likely would not want to adopt, but at least they are specified.

There's two slightly different issues here, I think. One is a license, to say that d.o can use/edit/reshuffle content posted on it even though the original poster owns it. The other is a disclaimer, to make it clear that the d.o admins are not responsible for the content on the site so can't/shouldn't be sued. Both are, I think, important to have in simple and clear language, but not in-your-face so it becomes a distraction. We don't want to look like lawyers. :-)

Can we close this?

Has anything been done about it, and/or have we decided that nothing should be done? If not, then no we can't close it. :-)

There are still no TOS or copyright/left statements (that I'm aware of) that apply to forum pages, which is what the issue refers to. The options, as I see them:

A) Do nothing for now, leave the status at active, let our future selves deal with the issue.
B) Mark it 'won't fix' or 'by design'. Though that seems onerous to me.
C) Fix it (maybe passing the task to the redesign or legal group, and/or to the DA).

I personally prefer C. Marking active for now.

"Hay I Have Suggest this website" DMCAnow.com Because i also visit this webpage. Its very help Ful Website.

I have no idea what #28 means but I doubt the assignment was intentional and probably no point in assigning it back to sepeck so just unassigining it.

Michelle

At the moment, the licensing FAQ #5 says all content from d.o (what about subsites??) is licensed CC by attribution, sharealike.

Problems:

1. There's no indication to users that their content licensed in this way.
2. It is not clear to visitors of the site how content is licensed, unless they happen to find the FAQ.
3. We don't specify how one should attribute (IMO link to original content)

It's not just forum content.

Re #30, I agree, these should be clarified. My preference would be a statement in the footer, with the appropriate CC logo w link to the license. The CC license language I believe covers things like appropriate attribution.

(I may be wrong, but I could have sworn there was a more recently active issue on this topic.)

So we have a short-term proposal to add to the footer: "Website content licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike, Copyright the original author(s). "

Anyone want to +1/-1/tweak that proposed text? We can do this easily and should, even if the ultimately plan is to add some TOS checkbox when people sign up or something else.

We hace a proposal!

+1 for #33. I suggest also including a link to the license itself: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Ah, yes. I was actually thinking it should link to http://drupal.org/licensing/faq/#q5 since that links to the ultimate license and provides more specificity than appropriate for the footer.

+1 - but should we also link to our 'more information' page http://drupal.org/node/14307 ?

I'm fine with either #35 or #36. +1.

+1 for 35. Is this RTBC?

I don't think we can do this atm for all content. The lack of author consent for a large number of posts is an issue.

What I think can be CC by SA:

Documentation
Publications by core committers
Publications by the security team

If we wait to get consent on everything we will never be able to move forward.

Even posts by the security team include content written by non-team members which we would need to get.

I think, given the history of cc-by-sa clearly stated on docs for a very long time, it is reasonable for someone contributing content to other areas without knowing the license to assume it would also be cc-by-sa.

+1 for number 35 and marking this RTBC to get this rolling.

I think this also should be dealt with in customizations. It's been over a year since it's been RTBC. I think we just need the code to make it happen.

I'm not sure where in drupalorg_crosssite/drupalorg_crosssite.module it should go, but I'm assuming this should go across all *.Drupal.org sites.

Moving this back to Needs work as there's no code to implement.