[Noisebridge-discuss] Licensing of individual contributions to our Wiki & mailing lists / Open Hardware

[Danny O'Brien]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:33 PM, John Magolske<listmail at b79.net> wrote:
> I'd like to understand better how the licensing of contributions to
> the Noisebridge Wiki & mailing lists works. I see listed on the pages
> of our Wiki "Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported" [1].
>
> Is content provided by an individual still "owned" by that individual?
> For example, if I were to post some project plans on a Noisebridge
> Wiki page, would I still be the copyright holder? And if so, could I
> release these plans on my own web-site at a later date under a less
> restrictive license (ie, the "by-sa" [2] or "by" [3])?

Yes; it's just a license, not a transfer of rights. As the owner, you
can re-license your work as much as you want. Note though that other
people's contributions, as you say, wouldn't be covered by the
dual-licence. You'd have to contact them individually and ask to use
their material (actually this is a little fuzzier, but it's generally
seen as good practice when relicensing material.)

> The above is one particular use case, but this touches on the murky,
> undefined areas of collaboratively developed open-hardware, which I
> think would be interesting to start having some discussions around.
>

This is actually an example which is pretty well understood. There are
definitely other areas where open-hardware has some IP weirdnesses,
but you particular situation is not that unusual.

> Any thoughts, suggestions or clarifications much appreciated!


Hope that helps!

d.


>
> John
>
>
> [1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
> [2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
> [3] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
>
>
> --
> John Magolske
> http://B79.net/contact
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>