[cc-community] Relicensing after publication

[Marc Stober]

I am not a lawyer but I don't think there is anything special you need to
do to add a CC license to an already published work, as long as you still
own the copyright (and you haven't made exclusive agreements with another
publisher). But maybe there could be more education around that, that's a
good idea.

- Marc



On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 7:09 AM, Per Starbäck <per at starback.se> wrote:

> At https://creativecommons.org/faq/ and other places is advice on how
> to apply CC licenses to material you are publishing.
>
> I would like to see help also on how to apply CC licenses after the
> fact; how to best tell the world that you henceforth allow
> distribution of some of your works according to a specific license
> even when not making a new release of the works. (Note: I'm not
> currently looking for help in how to do this myself. Rather I'd like
> to see what thoughts others have on this, and that it hopefully will
> lead to a solution for others looking for such help.)
>
> I think this is something that could be a rather popular if it was
> easy and clear how to do it. But to republish the work yourself will
> often be seen as much too much trouble, in particular if it is
> material you don't have digital versions of. That is not practical for
> uses such as "I release all books I've published before 1980 with
> CC-BY".
>
> I think of this as signing a document stating three parts:
>
> 1. what works is it about
> 2. what license
> 3. from when does it apply
>
> I think common answers for those are:
> 1. everything / everything published before a particular time / only
> works of a specific kind, like photographs, short stories, ...
> 3. from the date signed / from my death / x years after my death
>
> I'm guessing that many people who normally wouldn't consider using a
> CC license still think that copyright terms are much too long and
> would prefer to relicense when they see no commercial benefits in
> having it otherwise anymore, either because they are thinking of what
> happens when there are gone, or because they are thinking of stuff
> they've published decades ago.
>
> Is that sensible? What would you do with that signed document then?
> What help can we give?
>
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