Additional licenses for Creative Commons contributions

Question

Some framing around content licensing...

As a content creator who contributes to the data repository that is Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange, authors maintain ownership of their works, even though their contributions are freely available on the internet. Those contributions are licensed at the time of publishing in two ways (and, for the sake of this question, let us assume these two licenses both exist, as some folks question the existence of dual licensing):

• Authors grant a Creative Commons license (slightly different variants, depending on the time of contribution, but let's just call it all CC BY-SA for simplicity). This is a blanket license that applies to anyone and everyone in the world.
• Contributions are also "perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive[emphasis mine] basis." (We'll call this the "Stack Overflow License.)

As the author of a contribution, content creators can continue to use their works however they wish. Content Creators can grant additional licenses in conjunction with the Creative Commons license and Stack Overflow license, though those additional licenses must also respect the other licenses--ex, the CC BY-SA is well known to have a "no additional restrictions" clause that prevents an entity from claiming "CC BY-SA" but then further limiting usage. Essentially--additional licenses can be more permissive but not more restrictive.

The Question

If a content creator wishes to apply a more permissive license to their content, what is the appropriate way for the content creator to inform this community as well as anyone viewing that data?

For example

Looking at the extreme case, perhaps a user wishes to apply the CC0 license, which places the content wholly in the public domain--effectively waiving any attribution or other restrictions. Would the content creator label their content with a "disclaimer" in their answer that denotes that the content is freely usable?

A little more specific

Many content creators here are also bloggers, writers, or contributors to other websites & open-source projects. Oftentimes, an answer here may be a derivative work of something that creator has previously published elsewhere (like their blog). Depending on that original location, the license is likely not the same CC BY-SA--So that particular answer would carry the CC BY-SA license, but may also carry an additional license from the original work, which may also be attached to derivative works, such as the Stack Overflow answer.

What is the best way for a creator to ensure that the additional licenses are conveyed to visitors of the Stack Overflow version?

Answer 1

From a moderator's point of view - an additional license added somewhere to a post wouldn't be too dissimilar to a signature. It is noise that detracts from the content of a post. There's nothing stopping you from relicensing your code as you feel fit - there's just no good way to do it, inline with a post or the other way. Even in place - it assumes whomever is using the code actually notices, is looking for it, and benefits. On SE we know everything is on roughly the same license - some variant of CC-by-SA. Usefully finding a poly-licensed post or code with a suitable license is tricky.

There's no real mechanism cause when the core of the site was designed, it wasn't needed and practically, it would add a huge amount of complexity to the platform if formalized somehow.

Codidact deals with this with a drop down menu with license options but honestly that wouldn't scale too well IMO at the volumes SE has. It would certainly make something like the datadump more 'fun' and potentially unusable in certain contexts. Want to stand up a commercial, CC-by-SA compliant alternative if SE falls? You need to filter out all the non commercial licenses. It lets you pick one alternative - which isn't what we want here. We want "CC-by-SA" and "additional freedoms". Assuming SE wanted to do this, this is probably the sanest approach, especially tied into search. (Which leads me to the question of what license a code snippet from a question falls under, should it be used in an answer under a differently permissive license).

I don't think anyone even worried about the license versions being changed when Jeff did it (which resulted, eventually, in a kerfuffle as people complained about retroactive relicensing, during one of many low points of trust). Practically, outside keeping the company from paywalling posts - I suspect the initial choice of license was basically a poison pill to prevent that, rather than anything else.

To borrow a phrase from Jeff:

It's not a license mess, some people are a mess.

And in a sense, the situation is a mess.

I mean, the most practical/safe way is to republish your content, with whatever license you want, and link it back to SE for context. This is an unsatisfying answer. And really this does feel like its about more solidly asserting individual content ownership in a period where trust in the company maintaining access for us to things like the data dump is weak. Where there's a lack of trust in the integrity of the company, it might be worth considering backing up one's own content.

(I believe you can request a data dump of your own posts via the GDPR form but the current design is painfully unintuitive.)

Answer 2

There's no good way to do this on the SE platform.

The CC BY-SA license is extremely visible and obviously connected to each work. It's in the footer of every page. It's in the "share" menu on every question and answer. It's in the hover text on a comment's timestamp. It's in SE API responses. It's in the data dump. In just about every way a person can obtain a copy of a post, it's clearly linked to the appropriate CC BY-SA license based on when it was created or modified.

I have seen people put a disclaimer in their profile. However, this has a lot of problems, ranging from the fact that there aren't good timestamps for when such a disclaimer is added or edited and therefore what posts it may apply to. There's also a lack of connection between the profile and to the post itself without additional work.

The strongest available solution would be to put text in the body of each post. This is problematic for a number of reasons, as well. Once a post is edited, it becomes more difficult to see when this was added and if it was added by the original creator to ensure it's a valid claim. There's also a strong culture of removing extraneous information and this would have legal implications. If given the choice between what the body of the post says and the clearly marked terms, I would follow the clearly marked terms, even if the contributor is trying to use a more permissive license.

The best solution would be for SE to implement a license chooser. Just to stick with the CC licenses, CC 0, CC BY, CC BY-SA would be valid, assuming that SE believes that CC BY-SA is the most restrictive license possible. There may be other open-source licenses that would be appropriate as well. Unless and until something like this is implemented, anyone using SE data should treat it all as the marked CC BY-SA version.

Also, for the record, if I had the option, I'd mark all of my SE contributions as CC BY.