CC Licensing Report — Eliot Fournier

About me

I am a Political Science student currently specializing in Internet Studies and Digital Social Science, both through my current studies and external education programmes. My experience as part of civic projects and online initiatives helps me refine my understanding of digital societies through a fundamentally interdisciplinary practice blending social science, technology, and law.

As a tech enthusiast, I learnt web design and standards by myself, and I'm passionate about complex logical structures and modelization.

As an amateur writer and a citizen, I got involved in various community projects and creative initiatives, which allowed me to develop an habit for teamwork on complex issues, both in terms of complex thinking and technical problem-solving. I love learning new things and spent most of my studies expanding upon my baseline programmes with self-taught skills and personal experimentation.

Education

Professional Experience

Things I Did

Projects & Writeups

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SCP International: Project proposal for a license upgrade from CC BY-SA 3.0 to CC BY-SA 4.0

I wrote this document as my final work for the Creative Commons Open Culture Certificate Course to offer an assessment of the possible legal implications and requirements of switching from CC BY-SA 3.0 to 4.0 by default for an international network of wiki sites totalizing over 100'000 articles written by individual users, and millions of derivative works all over the internet. As an administrator of said community network, I made this work both a legal reflection and a practical plan to make the switch from one license to another, tackling questions such as:

What are the differences between versions 3.0 and 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license? How do they apply to the specific case of online collaborative content?
How to change the default license applied to user-generated content on all wikis in a legal, consistent, and coordinated manner? Is this compatible with their respective limitations and means?
How to account for some jurisdiction-specific limitations, such as sui generis database rights that may apply to a lot of wiki content and data?
What are the implications of this update for existing 3.0-licensed content? How to take advantage of the "one-way upgrade logic" of CC licenses to go toward a long-term expansion of 4.0 to all contents?
How to properly inform the community and contributors of what this new license means for them, what rights it gives them, and respect their consent and legal rights in the process of making the upgrade?

Writing this report was a unique way to consolidate my understanding of online licensing and intellectual property; it raised great questions and prompted interesting discussions with colleagues from branches from all over the world. In the future, I would like to work with people from more countries and legal traditions to expand upon this resources accounting for more national variations so the plan is more robust as we concretely apply it.

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