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Comment by npsomaratna | Hacker News Reader

Could someone more knowledgeable explain what the practical effect of this license change is? As far as I can see, there isn't much of a difference?

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With 3.0 there were multiple versions of the licence, which varied depending on the country in which they were used. With 4.0, a single licence is applicable worldwide, with official translations in over 30 languages. This eliminates the need for different ported versions of the licence with changed language tailored for specific jurisdictions.

Also, it clarifies that linking to a webpage with attribution information is allowable. It also enables people to fix attribution mistakes within a reasonable time, which is important to help address simple mistakes without the need for overly aggressive copyright enforcement demands.

     This comment is based on the "Stepping into the future: Wikimedia projects’ transition to Creative Commons’ 4.0 license" article from 29 June 2023 by Stephen LaPorte, Jacob Rogers and Shaun Spalding [0], and may be shared and modified, with attribution, under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

[0] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/06/29/stepping-into-the-futu...

> It also enables people to fix attribution mistakes within a reasonable time

I don't know if relevant for Wikipedia, but in CC BY-SA 3.0 where the entire licence was invalidated if you made a mistake with the attribution.

I was reading of an exploit where an organisation is publishing photos under the 3.0 licence, searching for minor infractions and then extorting random bloggers and businesses for infringement. I believe the 4.0 licence addresses this by allowing users to fix a faulty attribution within a reasonable time.

Yeah it's called copyright trolling because of how similar it is to patent trolling. Version 3.0 of the license isn't usually the favored version though since iirc it did include some mitigations on what's allowed for the whole attribution thing.

The one that's usually preferred is version 2.0, which has some fairly specific attribution requirements that are easy to mess up.

I wasted a few hundred issues on those trolls. I wrote about it here: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/abmahnung-creative-commons

I think that's pretty much detailed in the "Why did we update our license to CC BY-SA 4.0?" section of the article.

The practical reasons are almost entirely about legal minutia. It opens up some possibilities, like being able to seamlessly use OTHER CC-BY-SA 4.0 content, but there won't be any concrete tangible difference to readers.

A while back stackoverflow went to CC-BY-SA 4.0, and bunch of people got into a snit about it: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

No one could ever explain what the actual problem was that they had with the change. They admitted there wasn't any practical difference but still were red-hot angry about it. Some people are weird about licenses.

The issue was that StackExchange relicensed (without permission) all previous contributions. Their license (currently) says users grant them the ability to use their contributions under CC BY-SA 4.0 with no "or later". I'm pretty sure the previous one (for 3.0) was the same. StackExchange had no legal right to relicense those contributions.

Wikimedia got it right by putting "3.0 or later" in their terms of use (TOU). This allowed them to _legally_ claim all old contributions are available under 4.0. They're still also available under 3.0, but that's a minor detail.

I still don't get what these nuances ACTUALLY means for someone who might have contributed when the TOU was 3.0 and then suddenly an effectively identical license gets applied "without permissions" (4.0), and now there's a problem? How?

Most people (myself included) had no issue with the premise. The issue comes from StackExchange having a (then recent) history of starting to ignore their community. That has continued even to today.

Basically, people aren’t necessarily upset about them relicensing, but that there’s been no discussions with the community about these things. This was just another nail in the wound, and people got upset.

I am not claiming more knowledge.

The practical effects are a function of the magnitude of the change and the scale at which it applies.

In the case of Wikipedia the scale is vast in terms of social impact and so the effect is large even for a small change...in a the-universe-includes-a-lot-of-corner-cases sort of way.

They have some sources already using version 4. They had to upgrade or not use these sources (see ShareAlike: «If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original»).

I think v4.0 adds one way compatibility with the GPL v3 too.

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