Hacker News Reader

Comment by Titanous | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea, but the "non-commercial" clause of the Creative Commons license makes the documents pretty useless as the only real use would be in a commercial context.

View on HN

Mark from Catalyze. We picked non-commercial as the CC license type simply so that people wouldn't modify and then resell the documentation itself. From my understanding, the license allows users to use our docs for your company policies, but you can not resell the content itself. That would be against the spirit of what we are trying to accomplish with releasing the documentation. If you think that the license is prohibiting this, let me know. We want to make sure that we strike a happy medium of usage/keeping the policies "free".

EDIT: Yeah, it seems like there are some far reaching not-understood legal implications of the "NC" license. Ok, we're going to re-commit and re-issue these with the BY-SA. Should be up in a few minutes.

From the CC license: "NonCommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation."

I'm definitely not a lawyer and would like to hear from one interpreting the license for this use case, but it sounds like that could be interpreted to mean not okay to use for a business if it generated a commercial advantage, like HIPAA compliance.

Clarification from your lawyer (published on your site) would be good if you aren't okay switching to a more permissive license.

Suggestion: name them "FREE HIPAA DOCS AVAILABLE AT [URL]" and use a license requiring attribution, should make them hard to resell?

I think you are looking for ShareAlike - i.e., that you can modify the content but must redistribute under the same license.

I too would love to be able to use the verbiage as a base for my extremely small (me) company that does deal with some PHI. I have no desire to sell your documents but in reading through the license it does appear that I can't use it. Any chance that you could re-license it so that I/we can use it within a commercial (small!?) venture?? :-) Please? I am happy to attribute or not attribute Catalyze. Either way, thanks for releasing these.

We're going to re-license and release these with CC BY-SA 4.0. Just updated the github repo. Let us know if you need any help!

Awesome, thanks! Don't forget the gh-pages branch.

Just updated that too. Should be BY-SA 4.0 across the board now. Thanks!

Oh, wow, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. About a year ago I went through websites to try and figure out what all this HIPPAA means for my website but it is very confusing. It is great to have a template to at least start with. Thank you!!!

Awesome!

You might want to update your language that forbids commercial use.

Just did. Thank you!

Said it before, say it again, thank you Mark. I wonder what our industry would look like if we spent less time reinventing the wheel all day long and more time working on the problems we love.

Precisely. I was expecting this to be incredibly useful. With the license restriction, these documents lose tremendous value.

Presumably, while one couldn't simply adopt this document verbatim, it could be used as an educational source when drafting your own original HIPAA compliance policies.

Doesn't that mean you just can't sell the policies? You can still use them internally in a commercial enterprise, no?

I just did a bunch more reading here on the topic in this article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234435/

We removed the license restriction and changed it to CC BY-SA 4.0. Thank you for the feedback!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com