How to guarantee that when I choose a website that publish articles under Creative Commons, that they will not change their license?
There will never be a guarantee.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
17 points (94.7% liked)
Asklemmy
47095 readers
1721 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
If you want to publish, please do 2 things - find a publisher which does not necessitate exclusivity (as in, you do not necessarily have to just publish something on there portal) - and secondly, make a portal of your own, and publich a duplicate copy there. This serves 2 purposes, if someone really wants to follow your work, they can just follow your website, and in case a future bait and switch happens, you have a backup of all your work.
I may be wrong with creative commons but doesn't it work the same with the gpl. They can relicenae it inder a different license if they own the copyright but you still have access to the version under the first license.
You can totally do it with the GPL as well, as long as you own 100% od the copyright. Of you accept a patch, and don't get copyright attribution... You're stuck with the GPL forever.
stuck with the GPL forever
If you accept a patch and don’t have the ability to relicense it, you can remove it and re-license the new codebase. You can even re-implement changes made by the patch in many cases, whether those changes are bug fixes or new features.
If you re-implement the change, you do need to ensure this is done in a way that doesn’t cause it to become a derivative work, but it’s much easier if you have copyright to 99% of a work already and only need to re-implement 1% or so. If you’ve received substantial community contributions and the community is opposed to relicensing, it will be much harder to do so.
A clean room implementation - where the person rewriting the code doesn’t look at the original code, and is only given a description of the functionality - which can include a detailed description of the algorithm - is the most defensible way to perform such a rewrite and relicense, but it’s not the only option.
You should generally consult an attorney when relicensing and shouldn’t just do it casually. But a single patch certainly doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever.
If you want to publish, please do 2 things - find a publisher which does not necessitate exclusivity (as in, you do not necessarily have to just publish something on there portal) - and secondly, make a portal of your own, and publich a duplicate copy there. This serves 2 purposes, if someone really wants to follow your work, they can just follow your website, and in case a future bait and switch happens, you have a backup of all your work.