Upgrade to CC BY-SA 4.0

I know we’d like to do it for all SOO courses. Can we upgrade to 4.0 or do we need to get some kind of community consensus? Same license, newer, better version: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

I think upgrading is a good idea, any reason not to?

Not at all. We’re planning on using it for our data anyway, so I think it would be a good decision to use it across the board.
What do you think, @Carl?

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Agreed we should upgrade across the board. Going forward (ie for new content / grants / endeavours), I think it would be difficult to justify retaining an older version, and better to be consistent across our stuff.

Great! Let me know if you guys need any help implementing. The chooser has
been updated with the link/code for 4.0 so it can be machine-readable on
the site: http://creativecommons.org/choose/

This discussion took place by email, and below is my somewhat ugly attempt to make it accessible to a broader audience.

[quote]Jane:
Non-standard CC logo p2pu.org links to https://p2pu.org/en/pages/terms-of-use/ which does expressly mention CC BY license in Section 6. User Content:

"Therefore, by submitting User Content to us, you hereby grant P2PU and its affiliates and every user of the P2PU service a license to your User Content under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0 license available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode."

This was a decision by P2PU’s lawyers and pro bono help I imagine.

However see CC’s policy regarding license logos at https://creativecommons.org/policies. We specifically require any license logos to be linked directly to the specific CC BY license in use. I think P2PU didn’t do that before for stylistic reasons, but with the upgrade to 4.0, we ought to link any CC license logos directly to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You can always have a line of text under it linking to P2PU TOU to specify details, but the logos need to be machine-readable and linked to the deed.

So basically, I agree with Carl here. :)[/quote]

Carl:
My original comment was picking up two issues - first is our non-standard use of CC logos - as Jane says we should rectify that. But more important is that our own terms of use don’t make clear we actually licence our own content under CC. A logo on homepage that links to completely different terms of use is ambiguous at best. The mention of CC in cl 6 of our website terms is just an in-licence from users (ie permits P2PU to use their content) it’s not a licence from P2PU to the world to use their/our stuff. None of this is earth shattering - our intent is reasonably clear - but it highlights a bit of landscaping to be done while updating to 4.0. Particularly if we want to be leading by example on these issues :).

[quote]Carl:

  • user-created content - currently published as CC-BY-SA v3.0 (non-ported?). Our terms don’t expressly permit us to republish that content under CC v4.0; query how we handle if/when sunsetting Lernanta. Query whether v3.0 is interoperable with v4.0 [does republishing under 4.0 satisfy the share-alike provisions of 3.0?] - I can’t remember, so noting for checking.[/quote]

[quote]Jane:
Very good point Carl. Since P2PU never said in its TOU V3.0 or later, so changing to V4.0 would entail a change in the TOU. P2PU might want to notify all is users of such a change in the TOU from V3.0 to V4.0 – either via tacit consent by continuing to use site or requiring some button click. That is up to P2PU and how it wants to go forward with such a change.

Regarding SA provision: All SA licenses after version 1.0 allow you to license your contributions under a later version of the same license. Regardless of license version, the original creator’s license on the work is always maintained.

Here’s how that works: Whenever you create an adaptation of a work, the original work you adapted is still governed by its original license terms. You are only ever licensing your contributions to the new adaptation under your SA license. So technically, two licenses govern the derivative work just as two creators have contributed to the derivative work. [/quote]

Carl:
Jane has nailed the solution going forward - one of changes I’d make to our website terms is broaden the cl 6 in-licence from users for us to (re)-distribute their work under CC BY SA 4.0 “or substantially similar licence (including without limitation an earlier, later, or jurisdiction-specific (“ported”) version of that licence” (or words to that effect).

Past content is the bigger issue - we publish people’s stuff on p2pu.org under CC BY SA 3.0 coz that’s what they agreed to when they gave it to us - query can we now distribute that same content (ie not just new SA works) under CC BY SA 4.0. I’m comfortable we can, as using 4.0 is substantial compliance with our agreement with users to use 3.0, but just worth noting internally that we’re making a call on this.

Agree with you Carl, except one point of clarification –

Re past content: “I’m comfortable we can, as using 4.0 is substantial compliance with our agreement with users to use 3.0” - can you elaborate? I haven’t read the P2PU TOU in detail other than the reference to CC BY above, but my understanding is that users agreed to 3.0 - but not to a later version - unless there is text in TOU I’m missing. P2PU itself couldn’t change the license version on existing third party resources, unless it got permission from the third parties or the third parties did it themselves. But as I mentioned above, P2PU could always seek to obtain this permission. There are a variety of ways organizations obtain permissions for things like this: for example, through their TOU (maybe this is what you mean); through some kind of notification the next time the user uploads a work (which could note that P2PU is changing the default CC license version to 4.0 and that the user agrees to change her previous contributions to 4.0 as well as the work she is uploading now); etc.