Licensing discussion for LessWrong Posts

You are explicitly demanding to proprietise others' work, for no benefit to them.

While I'm in rough agreement with the general spirit of this comment, "no benefit" isn't exactly right. If they use any of my material, then they're taking my work, making it more accessible to people who might not have heard of it, and both spreading the ideas I wanted to be spread as well as making me personally more known. That's work that benefits me.

It'd be a sucker business model if they had an automated program to compile books from posts and sell them on Amazon and they kept all the money.

This is them spending money to turn things into audio, then trying to sell enough audio files or subscriptions to pay the costs. In exchange, we get more exposure and people who wouldn't hear our stuff otherwise can hear it. This seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable exchange as applied to my own posts, and I have no 'ick' reaction to money exchanging hands. Do you really have a mental image of some hard-working sweating LW poster, like me, living in poverty while Castify, dressed in a suit and dripping jewels, lounges around on my back? This is not a particularly lucrative engagement they're entering, and I see no reason to imagine that audiobooks would ever come to exist otherwise.

The issue is that we have been called parasites, yet we haven't done anything parasitic—in fact, short of asking for feedback, we haven't done anything at all. We are asking for feedback because we don't want to be parasitic. We understand there will some people who will never be comfortable with us using their stuff, some who wish to be compensated, some are happy to allow LessWrong [management] to decide what's in their interest and some who are happy to freely allow us to use their material, perhaps subject to some restrictions.

What's offensive is you using loaded terms to those who are actively trying to engage with you to maximize the utility for the community. If the end result is that there are no terms beneficial to both us and the community, so be it. The premise that we'd like to use your stuff with no benefit to you is incorrect. We would rather not pursue our business model than be parasites.

That was why we created this discussion in the first place.

Can we be less rude to people that aren't used to our community's discussion norms? Calling someone a parasite isn't going to convince them of anything, and we want people like Rick to engage with us instead of just exchange some money and ignore the community.

It is trivially true that people may gain from their work being published, even in the absence of remuneration from the publisher. For example, it may contain product placement they are being paid for, it may gain fans they can later sell products to, or it may spread ideas they wish to see popularized. Indeed, in the absence of these "parasites", many of these would willingly pay for their work to be published, and indeed some do.

In this case, the articles in question were not made to provide this site with ad revenue or because they were commissioned by some wealthy individual, they were made to be read, and to inform others of their contents regarding rationality. Anything that allows more people to access this material aids that goal, and as such this deal is mutually beneficial to both parties. Of course, it would be nice if someone was willing to pay, but frankly none of us are going to pay (or donate our time) to produce such material, and we are fortunate that there is someone who expects sufficient benefit from this.

Very true. It's hard to know how everyone will use the files once they get them onto the computer. What would happen if we released all copyright protection like Zenhabits? I have no idea. It's an interesting idea. I wonder how it would play out in reality. I'm not sure if you've noticed but we do have Eliezer's large essay "The Simple Truth" available for free so people can try out the service.

LessWrong is a unique situation for us. Most of the other blogs we will be partnering with are written by a sole blogger who will want us to use some form of copyright protection. This is why we've asked for opinions on the topic here to see what everyone would like to do.

I personally think that an opt-out or opt-in system seems the most fair as it gives the individual the option.

Why do people feel the need to add this sort of prelude when praising someone? (Can I also ask that David answer first before anyone else does?) David, suppose you deleted the preamble and looked at the resulting sentence - what does your brain object to?

Stallman has spent nearly thirty years consistently being pretty much completely right, and utterly uncompromising about it. This is, of course, unforgivable