License

The statements and opinions on this page are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of CouchSurfing International.

Licensing issues are difficult. About some information we can be pretty clear: user's private information should not be publically accessible, so let alone be available under a free license. For other types of information the situation is not as straightforward. Texts written on this wiki can be useful in other places. Someone might want to remix videos created for CouchSurfing by CouchSurfers. Some users might want to give other people the right to use their pictures in other places. For now this article is mainly about the CouchSurfing Wiki.

Discuss this issue in the Brainstorm Group.

1 Current situation
- 1.1 Why
2 Future options
3 Comments

Current situation

Currently Guaka simply copied a part of the Terms into the message people see when they submit:

You Grant CouchSurfingSM International a License. By submitting any content (including without limitation, your photograph) to the Wiki of CouchSurfingSM International, you hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, have distributed and promote such content in any form, in all media now known or hereinafter created and for any purpose.

Why

CouchSurfing needs to have these rights in order for the site to work. It also allows to later add another, freeer license to the works.

Future options

If you want your contributions to be available under free licenses, you can add {{free-license}} to your User page

Creative Commons

It would be nice however, to allow people to share, mix and use this wiki's content for other uses.

The Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is probably the most interesting option. There are many works under this license.

However, as long as CouchSurfing decides not to go completely Creative Commons it will not be possible to use other works available under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license on this wiki.

GNU Free Documentation License

For license compatibility with Wikimedia projects.

Open Data

It is important to think about this point. How can people use their data in trusted networks. How does the exchange work and can people take their data along. Not only the self insert information, also the system created content and links.

Comments