Ownership of the contents

If you go to the pixls.us top page, at the bottom you’ll find the copyright notice for the site, and a link to the license:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

There’s a concerted effort by Pat and the others to make sure we properly tag our images with respect to the license we wish to post them under, not so certain by me how that applies to our written utterances. For me, I have no expectation regarding the persistence of my posted prose, except to personally assume that it can last for the ages. It’s one of the reasons i don’t pick cute monikers to go by; I stand by my words, and do consider them carefully.

Because Troy made some significant contributions interspersed with the color commentary (literary color), there’d be some significant holes in the discourse if he removed his posts. That said, if he really wants to remove them, I’d personally not be one to stand in the way, there are enough cognizant others here to continue the discourse. But the license, if applicable to what we contribute, is in play, I firstly think it’s intent should be upheld.

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Well, regarding the license then:

  • The removal of Troy’s name in his posts is a violation of the license.
  • Anyone is free to copy or “remix” what he said, crediting him.
  • You can copy his stuff, but that doesn’t mean that you can force him to do/don’t do what he wants with his own contributions.

" No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits."

Discuss :smiley:

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#1: Yep, that’s pretty clear.
#2: Same Yep.
#3: I think we all decided what that meant when we hit “reply…”

Hi, I often read on this forum, rarely comment.
A little thing to say about this matter is that I think the arguments regarding leaving gaps in threads as a consequence of removing posts is kinda beyond the point.
I would rather Troy not to delete his messages too, but this isn’t up to discussion, this is about autonomy.
Do you own your posts? Is it your right to remove them? I think the answer is (or should be) yes.

In this particular case, with Creative Commons licenses things may get tricky.
When you post something under that license the content is automatically licensed. You still own the copyright but anyone can copy it (as long as they respect the terms of the license), you can’t prevent it.
The issue here is that the posts written by Troy aren’t a COPY of his work licensed under the terms of the CC license, but his own creation. He wrote them.
He should be allowed to do whatever he wants with those contents. He owns them. However he was banned from it, so he couldn’t do it.

I would invite everyone to review the Forum FAQ and Terms of Service; you should decide for yourself if you want to be here or not.

I appreciate that he took time to share his in-depth knowledge, he clearly knows a lot about many things.

Multiple people reach out to Troy multiple time, both in private and in public to ask him to tone down his language. You can call it frontal or bullshit cutting or label it however you want to make it seem acceptable to you, but it is not acceptable here. Again, multiple admins asked multiple times. It isn’t that hard not to be rude, and yet, his behavior persisted many times. This was not a one time thing. We made it abundantly clear what the expectations for interaction here are, and he chose to continue to act in a way that is unacceptable.

Discourse, our forum software, locks the ability to delete posts after 60 days. This is meant to preserve the conversation. Each of your posts are part of a public dialog, it isn’t only the poster’s time to write the post, but others time to read, respond, and engage with those posts; the sum outweighs the single.

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He removed his name from the posts when he deleted his account. In that moment it will be replaced with an anonymous account. In many cases this is what users actually want.

As a general remark … I welcomed his knowledge but his style was super offensive. And that comes from a German who is often being blamed for being too direct.

I would happily welcome him back if he works on his style.

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Oh, really?

We have the default ToS for Discourse.

ToS take precedence no doubt, but I’d also assume anything communicated on a “public” forum is surely a matter of public record. Rewriting of history seems a strange thing to expect! Anyway it makes me sad… I’ve had friends like this who eventually relaxed, I’d hoped for the same. If a point can be made without it, then why say it :slight_smile:

Ok, there are several things here to discuss.

First of all, it seems that Creative Commons for the contents is incompatible with the setting of the forum software. Contributed material MUST be credited.
If software breaks that, then we have a problem. You may have whatever ToS you want, but the copyright of the contents is first. The Creative Commons license is basically a permission an author gives to copy the stuff she made. By not respecting the CC license you’re automatically violating the contributor’s copyright.

Second: You have your code of conduct, etiquette or whatever. You can block a user from further participation if she violates that code, but can you really decide on user’s past contributions unilaterally?
Does removing or modifying old content break conversations? Sure. Are you entitled to keep your users from doing it? Not so sure (sincerely I don’t care what the software does, you can’t justify with the defaults of the software you’re using for the forums).

At any rate, you’re not abiding to the CC license you designated for the site and you are acting as the contributed contents were yours to decide when it’s allowed to modify or delete.
The software excuse won’t cut it. Even the “respect for the community” excuse isn’t enough. You may think breaking conversations and removing content is rude and disrispectful (I could even say I agree to some extent), but you can’t force others to do what you feel it’s right.

This is broken and you have to fix it some way.

These are all fair points and certainly worth discussing. Before going too far I want to make a couple of things clear.

I really, really don’t like having to resort to a measure like this. In Troy’s case I think his contributions were extremely valuable and helpful on a topic that is extremely complex. Not having him here to help out is a loss. (Like @darix, if he’s amenable to toning down his interactions a little to hopefully not put off others, I’d still welcome his contributions and help).

This has to be weighed against his rather brusque manner of communicating, and the negative overall response to multiple entreaties to please be a little more considerate for the community. This was literally multiple times from various admins.

As this particular instance is a first occurrence like this we are doing our best to balance things.

CC licensing does require an attribution. In this case I would imagine a post where we can link/identify troys old account name to the anon account will fulfill the requirements for the license. I would imagine we could probably even add an attribution on the @anon11264400 user profile. I’m thinking this is the best way to preserve attribution requirements of content.

We don’t want to be in the business of unilaterally deciding anything, but we (the site) was granted a license to use the posted material. We are doing our best to accommodate things here, and trying to do what’s in the best interest of the community.

(edit) - I have attributed his old username to the anonymized account.

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Has pixels.us even violated the creative commons? That was stated as if it were a foregone conclusion, however, pixels.us are not remixing or reusing the content, rather pixels.us is the original publisher of this content.

If you consider what is published as a copy of Troy’s messages and that’s your argument behind your decision of not removing it or allowing its removal, then removing his name breaks the CC (copies must be credited to the author).

If you consider the contents to be the original contents of the author, then you should allow the author take whatever decision on them.

if you consider, as you appear to be saying that “pixls.us is the original publisher of this content”, then you’re assuming that us contributors transferred the intellectual property to you and you’re the new copyright holder. I don’t think ANYBODY here agreed to that, and that’s certainly not in the terms of service.

That we contributors grant you permission to publish our content under a CC license doesn’t mean that you OWN the copyright. Therefor if you don’t abide to the CC terms you’re violating our copyright.

I am no longer going to follow this thread even though I find it interesting. The fact is that the admins have been and are still being very considerate here. Using CC terms as a pretext to question the decisions of a user and the site is inappropriate in my opinion.

I don’t know FLOSS and the free community and their beliefs and policies that well but I would say that every user has a set of rights and responsibilities. I believe there is a right for the platform host to remove content that doesn’t abide by the spirit of the community. Yes, I have just made a contentious statement. But say you are in a public space. Are you allowed to say and do what you want? Sure. However, if you do things against the law or something that is disruptive, I bet you would be (politely, I hope) asked to leave. You may keep your speech and actions to yourself or elsewhere.

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I never claimed pixls.us had copyright of the work, but that if we are the original publisher, that we have other rights that include continuing to publish the work. Whether that is legally correct or not, I am not sure; I only want to point out that which you still reason to be correct may not be correct. That is, your de facto stance is that pixls.us is in violation of the license, but that may not be true.


Back to the creative commons:

The user asked to be removed. The specific message was something along the lines of “delete my account and my posts.”

The creative commons allows the copyright holder to request that their name be removed from the content, which is what happened when the user in question asked for their account to be deleted. This creative commons FAQ spells it out.

We have actually complied with the part of the license that we needed to, e.g. the user asked that their account to be removed, and we removed it. Since the content is CC licensed, we don’t have to remove the content, but rather the reference to the user’s name in conjunction with that content. We are still free to post the modified or unmodified content. We are in compliance with the license.

Since we also have all revisions of the posts, which are all creative commons licensed, we are free to redistribute and reuse those revisions as well. So when this user tries to rage quit and delete all their posts, we are free to restore the text as we see fit. We’ll do what is best for the majority of the users here, which is to post the text that is most useful to the conversation.

From the CC FAQ: CC licenses are not revocable. Once something has been published under a CC license, licensees may continue using it according to the license terms for the duration of applicable copyright and similar rights.

That is, once you hit the “publish” button, the CC license is granted, and we are free to use the material.


So, let’s recap:

  1. Are you free to do whatever you want with your posts here?

Yes, you may edit your posts as you see fit.

  1. Removing his name breaks the CC (copies must be credited to the author).

The user requested that his account be removed, and it was. We do not have to remove the posts, as those posts are used under the creative commons. We have complied with the license by honoring his request to remove his account (name).

The revisions and all content is creative commons licensed, that includes all versions of the posts. pixls.us has a copy of that text and we are free to use it under the license terms. Just like in real life, you can’t unsay something you’ve said.

If the user wishes that the text “nee troy_s” be removed from the profile, then we’ll happily do so, but that user should contact us and espouse their wishes.

  1. Unilateral decisions on user posts

I can only speak for myself, but I don’t make unilateral decisions on this form. I read every post here, and I have read literally every post here for the last 3 years. I make decisions on a case-by-case basis.

  1. But I own my content!

You are correct, you do have copyright over your content, but the CC license is non-revocable, and every time you publish something here, you are licensing that copy of that content under the creative commons. You can’t untype things that you’ve typed. All users should keep this in mind.

This is the only time this has happened on this forum. In general, everyone here is very nice and polite, and the conversations are excellent. I hope it doesn’t have to happen again, it doesn’t make me feel good, but I try and do what is best for the majority of the people here.


If anyone has further concerns, please voice them, I’d be happy to answer.

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I fully agree with that. I have never experienced such a polite forum before. There can, of course, always be a dispute but it should not threaten the friendly atmosphere of this community.

One should understand why Troy was being so ‘mean’. Yes, his tone was aggressive, but why? There’s always a reason why one has a short fuse. Working with other people who wouldn’t listen to him? ‘High horse complex’ or something? We should honestly look at ourselves whilst we judge him so much. If any diplomatic measures which were taken before blocking him from posting merely amounted to telling him to tone it down, I would say that this was quite insufficient. In fairness, if that was not the case then I’d be stuck for ideas as far as I can see now.

As for his content, if there is no possible resolution, what we’ll have to do is mine what he’s said for anything which we can use and then reuse that elsewhere. It’s our loss if we miss anything that he’s suggested which would benefit us but we happen not to like, so we should keep an archive for reference purposes (less his name and some of the images which he’s put up, of course, IIRC he has a right to be forgotten). I see no legal constraints against this.

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That’s not true. I usually edit my posts to correct typos and make things clear and that qualifies as “untype”. I’m also a human being who might be wrong about things or act in a way that I later regret, and being able to edit/remove content is a way to right my own wrongs without leaving a permanent impression to the world that I haven’t learned from my own mistakes. If I was a douchebag once I’d like to have a chance to redeem myself without leaving my douchebaggery set on stone.
But I guess that doesn’t count becase it would break the flow of a conversation where I was being a douche.

Also, you as a moderator have the ability to edit/remove my posts, whenever you decide that what I typed has to be untyped.
It’s again a double-standard that you, as a moderator, excercise a privilege you don’t extend to your users. The flexible interpretation of the CC license when it comes to consider a post a copy or an original publication depending on your arguments is also conflicting.
(keep in mind that I’m not arguing against blocking some user that has a behavior that is not acceptable. I’m arguing against the decision of not allowing users delete their content if they wish.)

So, you blocked Troy or anyone else because you didn’t like his tone? That’s fair of course.
Are you (or the software that runs these forums) going to prevent me (or anyone else) from modifying/deleting all my content if I want to? There we have a problem.

Personally I’m not ok with that. Not because I wanted to delete my content now, but because you’re restricting my freedom to do it. That’s not something I’d expect from a site about computer users’ freedom.
It looks like the majority of the users here are perfectly fine with that, but I’m not, so count me out too.
Delete my contents or not, I don’t care. But under these conditions I’m no longer participating.

So, you blocked Troy or anyone else because you didn’t like his tone? That’s fair of course.
Are you (or the software that runs these forums) going to prevent me (or anyone else) from modifying/deleting all my content if I want to? There we have a problem.

Personally I’m not ok with that. Not because I wanted to delete my content now, but because you’re restricting my freedom to do it. That’s not something I’d expect from a site about computer users’ freedom.
It looks like the majority of the users here are perfectly fine with that, but I’m not, so count me out too.
Delete my contents or not, I don’t care. But under these conditions I’m no longer participating.

Is it technically-possible to erase such things from the internet, though? The practicality of this ability to modify rests on how many copies there are. Assuming that this site’s data is hosted in a trustworthy fashion and hasn’t been copied elsewhere, this is a completely-justifiable thing to demand. Here on the internet, though, things can be copied a lot. Furthermore, backups are often made. In fact, one should always come with the assumption that what gets on the net is going to stay unless they can be reasonably sure that it will be deleted. If it’s important enough to be such a concern, you should leave this website and others like for your own online safety unless you can afford to compromise. Freedom is not for free by any metric.

I might sound harsh but I don’t know any other way to express myself, apologies if I sound as if I’m about to bite someone’s head off. (And I think it’s now much more apparent as to why I’m even turning up in this thread in the first place - I think my fuse is even shorter than Troy’s!)