NC or not-NC

NC or not-NC – the future of this blog awaits your verdict.
There have been recent comments suggesting that as I am advocating CC-BY (and not CC-NC) for Open Access papers, then this blog should also use CC-BY. CC-BY is the Creative Commons license that allows any re-use of the material as long as it is acknowledged; CC-NC additionally forbids re-use for commercial purposes.
My current position is logical – a blog is not an Open Access paper and there is no reason why it should carry an Open Access license. However we anticpated this when we set up the blogs and wrote:

Welcome! – September 1st, 2006
We welcome anyone as a poster but require them to register (to
prevent spam). We honour copyright, but ask that posters make [their]
contributions available under Creative Commons. This allows the posters
to retain their moral rights, but allows us to re-use the blog
(including their contributions) for other purposes if required (e.g. it
might be revised for supporting information, tutorials, etc.) We will
always attribute posters.

we debated as to whether we should require all contributors to  use CC-BY but initially decided that it was a big enough step to ask them to make their contributions available under CC of any sort. There has been no comment on this – I do not know that any potential contributor has failed to post because of the license and the possibility that their contribution could be re-used and resold without their permission.
Remember that re-use may be in ways we haven’t thought of. As a trivial example suppose someone develops a haiku-sniffing robot and runs it over this post. They will discover:
NC or not-NC
the future of this blog
awaits your verdict.
They can now write a book on “hidden haikus” using this material. It may not make any money but at least they can try.
Personally I have not (and never have had) a problem with making the blog CC-BY. So I appeal to readers – do any of you object to your posts being licensed as CC-BY? If I don’t hear objections we’ll change the license in 2 weeks.
Of course the previous contributions are still CC-NC. You can use all of mine as CC-BY, but I am not going to stick license on all 400.

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4 Responses to NC or not-NC

  1. Bill says:

    I am perfectly happy for whatever contributions I may make here (or, for that matter, anywhere) to be CC-BY.

  2. Egon says:

    CC-BY is fine with me. Also regarding all me previous comments in this blog.
    To all:
    if you actually are going to burn my comments on a CD for sale, or use it in my memoirs, please send me an email 🙂

  3. kg says:

    Your blog is not a research paper nor contains it research data. Nevertheless it is part of scholarly communications and the rules for scholarly commucations should be: Open Access.

  4. pm286 says:

    (3) I don’t agree with the logic but the end result will be CC-BY if I don’t get opposition from readers. I’ll take yours as a CC-BY vote. 12 days to go.

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