Freedom.  Everyone should be free to use, modify, distribute, and customize to their own needs as long as they impose no further restrictions on anyone else.  No further restrictions than what allows you the freedom yourself.  Money (commercial use) has absolutely nothing to do with it,  it is about guaranteeing that your contribution remains as free as you originally intended.

There are some other advantages of freedom that, in my opinion, are rarely noticed.  When you free up the "code" (written word in our case), it spreads, it grows. Greater numbers of people take pride in of the material.  Greater numbers of people feel included.  The original "code" gains more value, and the value is spread around further.  No single contributor owns all of the "value".

Likewise, the opposite is true.  No single contributor bears the entire burden of liability.  Pragmatically speaking, the more people that contribute and the wider the work is distributed the safer you are from legal attack and a single point of failure.  Consider for example the linux kernel.  If major corporate investors has no interest or investment in the kernel, do you really think they would be spending 10's of millions to protect it?  If someone does attempt to steal the kernel, they could conceivably be exposed to 100's or 1000's of different legal actions from each and every developer who has copyrighted material in the kernel.  Consider the irony in parties from completely opposite ends of the spectrum, from IBM to the FSF, defending linux!  Freedom is a mighty sword if you look at it this way.

I believe that people who have never tasted the freedom of an OSI type license are unnerved by it.  The natural inclination for is to keep a tight grip on their work, to monetize it, to assert control over it, to protect it, to limit distribution to preserve "value".  In my experience this inclination comes from living in a world that is primarily motivated by money, and is pretty damned compelling.  But the issues that we are discussing, which is our "product", are not about money.

What has convinced me that the commercial CCL with attribution and the share-alike clause is groklaw.

The articles by PJ are CCL, but the articles by themselves are not what gives groklaw "value". The contributions of the community are.  Can PJ provide all of the eyewitness accounts?  Do all of the transcriptions?  Run the web site itself?  Pay for the hosting of the web site herself?  Moderate everyone by herself?  Run around to courthouses all over the country and pick up the documents?  Provide all of the "scoops" herself?  Comb the entire internet for interesting articles herself? I think not.  But it is exactly these contributions that give PJ the seed for her articles, her soapbox.

The current linking, distribution, and licensing policies of groklaw are far, far more restrictive than even the Microsoft web site.  Groklaw is the most restrictive web site I have _ever_ seen.  She will not allow the site to be spidered, linked to, or in any shape, form, or fashion be distributed elsewhere, with or without attribution.  Not only are these policies completely opposite of all that is sacred in the open source world, they are in complete opposition to the spirit embodied in the internet itself!  Imagine if every news group, web site, and forum was this restrictive!  You might own the copyright to your comments, but she retains a Draconian death grip on any distribution of your contributions, including on her own web site.  The entire body of contributions to groklaw have effectively been sent into a black hole as far as I am concerned.

Because of the importance of the issues (we are at ip-wars, gearing up for the patent wars) involved, I would like ip-wars to be the complete opposite.  Allow the site to be spidered, syndicated, deep-linked, quoted, and distributed as far and as wide as possible.  Invite people like Andy to come up with creative ways to make use of the information.  Invite others to mirror the entire damn site in case Jeff gets hit by a bus.  Invite others to duplicate the site entirely because they don't like us or what we are saying.  Bring it on!  

It would appear there is pretty strong consensus to implement the share-alike provisions available from Creative Commons. So, I've added that provision to the site license. And while there is not as much consensus, it looks like the stronger preference is to not limit use of materials from this site to non-commercial. So, I've removed that restriction.

I have updated the Standard Operating Procedures page as well to address some of the other issues that have been raised (form of attribution, what to do about inconsistent licenses). Realizing no "perfect" solution can be crafted when dealing with such gray areas, I've done my best to craft things so stuff posted here becomes part of a "commons" and respects others' licenses/copyrights/etc. at the same time.

As always, continuous review and suggestions for improvement are always welcome!

I have had some experience, both personal and with trying to make others "get it", on the difference between 'moral' and 'legal'.

They are not always the same thing. I had the most problems with women going through divorces not seeing that while their husbands maybe "should have" done something ("moral"), in fact they did not "have to" do that something("legal").

example: Helping the kids financially after the age of 18. Often the ex-wife had the the kids living with her and supporting them financially. They felt that the ex-husband "should have" put up his fair share of the kids expenses. In fact, because the kids were over 18, they were classified by law as  independent adults and therefore the ex-husband was no longer "legally" required to support them in any way financially.

Just in response to the concern, the poll will not be the sole deciding factor in the final decision.  It will be used as one piece of data though.  I too would encourage posts here pro or con regarding the different options as a means to provide me with even more input.

Thanks heimdal for working on the article!!!

I have some reservations mostly regarding exactly where the line is drawn between an aggregate and a derived work, the same problem which is so knotty for the FSF in regards the GPL.   But since we are discussing our own work and are responsible for enforcing our rights thereto, so long as we retain some semblance of sanity in drawing the line ourselves that should not be a problem.

I still have some problems with the commercial vs non commercial versions.   This is greatly lessened IMO if we use the share-alike as any commercial usage would be required to carry the CCLP notice.  The drawback is that if a commercial entity sees a competitive advantage in carrying an article then they are not going to want their competitors to be able to carry it as well.  They could still negotiate with the author for rights to carry it without the CCLP notice - and they probably would because of the vagueness at the line between derivative and aggregate if they wanted to carry it.  The flip side is that they would be less likely to carry it because any of their competitors could also pick up the comment or article.  

On a strictly personal weighing I would say let the moral overweigh it; go with the full CCLP. If I get good enough at writing that somebody wants a commercial version of something I write here with exclusive rights they can contact me to rewrite to expand upon or customize the version posted here.

I would change my vote to the CCL share alike, commercial allowed as Tim suggests.  Once again I have no strong objection to the CCL/NC but in general would favor the CCLP because of my moral belief in expanding the commons.

If we copy a Groklaw story completely, then we can only make it available with the same license as Groklaw. I base this on section 4.a, which says that you are not allowed to sublicense the work. Giving it another (our) license is sublicensing.

In case of a derivative work, section 4.a doesn't apply. In that case we are able to apply our own license. But we are required to point to the original work, mention the copyright notices (see section 4.c) and say that the orignal work is released under the CCL (section 8.b).

The remedy for this is registration of the copyright, which allows statutory damages for each act of infringement. This is a problem. The site would have to file as a published database each quarter. This wouldn't protect the posts. In order to get the benefits of registration, the copyrights must be owned by the registrant. All text not so owned isn't registered. It's pretty clear, one registration - one owner.

So posters either have to live with the problem, copyright their contributions themselves (they can register a group of the as long as they all have the same owner) or assign the rights to the legal entity that owns ip-wars.

In the last, case ip-wars would grant the author a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to any and all non-exclusive rights, including the right to sublicense on the same terms. The conveyance could be done by specific assignment, probably generic assignment if it was clear what was being conveyed and signing of a work for hire contract, cancellable at will.

The last would be the easiest. It's bulletproof and only has to be done once. It has to be in writing, so you'd have to print out a form from the site, fill it in and mail it.

In the case of the contract, there has to be consideration. The traditional "1$ and other valuable considerations" would do, but who wants to mail back all those 1$ checks. It may be that protecting the messages by registering them would be sufficient consideration if the author had a net share of any recovery. This would make the consideration monetary and probably beyond challenge, though I'm not sure a third party would have standing to challenge the contract.

If a reasonable minority did this, it would make infringement very risky unless you knew which pieces were copyright to ip-wars. Since everything on the site has the same license terms, this might be kept secret. There would just be a statement that ip-wars held the copyright to some of the messages.

So how many people are concerned enough about violations of the site license to be in favor of something like this - either in the abstract or because they'd like to assign their messages?

I'm not sure I am, but it looked like the time was ripe to discuss this.

It basically comes down to an ethical problem versus a moral problem.

The ethical issue is imposing our will upon others using our material in regards to material we did not create.  This is a relatively weak argument because the downstream user is free not to use our material with it's restrictive license.

The moral issue is, at core, the categorical imperative.  By applying our rights to our own standards we exert pressure towards compliance with our moral values, in this case expanding the commons. That weak preesure by control of our own works is a clear statement that we want everyone to act, wherever possible, in compliance with those standards and are demonstrating such by deed.

By way of noting the value of this license I note that a certain web site of recent and local controversy would be precluded from using works here licensed.   Had such licenses been in effect, understood and enforced by contributors there that controversy could not have happened.

I like it in terms of adding weight to expanding our values and propogating an understanding of them, but as said before I want to sleep on it.  Unless I think of something which I feel overweighs the moral value, I'll change my vote.