LicenseSwitch

The idea of this feature is to have a “license switch” among a user’s preferences.

The license switch starts in “Default Copyright,” which means that if the user wants to do anything other than “Default Copyright,” the user must consciously flip the switch, thereby saying: “I understand and acknowledge that my posts are by another license.”

Possibilities

Page Licenses

You make it so that pages have a license associated with them.

Once created, the license can never change.

(Barring that the page is completely destroyed, and a new one made in it’s place.)

The license of the first page contributor is the required license for the remainder of contributions to the page.

If someone tries to edit a page who has their license switch set to the wrong setting, they are given an option to, for one edit only, conform to the license that applies to the page.

Implementations

There are no known implementations of this idea.

Activity

There is no known activity in this area.

Problems

But Can't People Lie?

Because I know someone’s going to think they’re clever by saying, “Oh hoh! But someone could copy the contents of a page, delete it, and paste it back under a new license! Your little scheme doesn’t work!…”

The answer to that is that this is no different than in the material world. People can plagiarize in real life, tell a publisher that they wrote something they didn’t, and get published that way. However, there is a piece of paper that the publisher has saying that the author has said that what they wrote is their own work, except as otherwise indicated in the text, and in those cases, that it is okay for the author to use it.

In our case here, the server has something similar to that piece of paper: The users settings, and the account of their commiting while using that setting.

“Ah, but can’t some evil server maintainer make the bits lie? Can’t they change what someone said they wrote?”

Yes, that is true. However, this is again little different than in the material world. After all, someone could take a signed contract, and then change the letters around on the paper, to make them say something else, that was not originally said.

The capability of any system to be gummed up, but this does not mean that we find no utility in systems.

See Also