Some comments regarding the ToS and PP of this forum

đź”® Meta
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I just read the ToS and PP of this forum and was surprised to see a lot of US law popping up – the DMCA and COPPA have nothing much to do in an EU jurisdiction, but some other laws apply which are not mentioned.

It might also make sense to bump the license that our posts here on this forums are under (i.e. CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0-Unported) to an updated, international licence that’s both Free and downstream compatible with (A)GPLv3 – that is the CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Also, what do you mean with this in the ToS:

Optional paid services or upgrades may be available on the Website. When utilizing an optional paid service or upgrade, you agree to pay Nextcloud the monthly or annual subscription fees indicated. […]

Will there be paid services on the user forums? I suppose not and that this clause is simply a remnant of a copy-pasted ToS and should simply be removed.

I realise that you’re busy, so no need to fix those right away, but I did want to mention it before I forget :wink:

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I’m guessing DMCA / COPPA references are mainly to do with Discourses boilerplate agreement being used, but yes, your point is valid that it would be good to have someone familiar with the laws of the relevant jurisdiction make some suggestions / changes.

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@Bugsbane is right, at the moment this is just the default boilerplate text from Discourse.

@jospoortvliet @bjoern Mind giving this one a few minutes to adjust it?

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I suspected as much. No hurry, it’s just the forum ToS/PP, so it can wait a bit for more important things to be fixed first.

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yes, definitely something we should fix and I also agree that we should define a license for the form posts.

Yes, I completely agree, CC-By-SA would be a good choice.

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I’d vote for CC-BY-SA, too.

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Die 05. 06. 16 et hora 13.10.44 scripsis:

I’d vote for CC-BY-SA, too.

To extend why I specifically asked for CC-BY-SA-4.0 – the 4.0 version is the
one that is downstream compatibleÂą with (A)GPLv3.

This means that you can take from the forum (e.g. if someone happens to post
some code here) and simply include it into Nextcloud so the whole can still
stay AGPLv3(+).

That being said, this is “just” a public discussion forum, so IMHO it would
suit the need even better if we omit even the SA/copyleft clause. Happy to
hear diverging thoughts and discuss.

The two CC licenses that are Free (as in Freedom) are:

  • CC-BY
  • CC-BY-SA

And since CC-BY is a lax/permissive non-copyleft license, it is also possible to re-license its content under (A)GPLv3 …or anything else really, as long as the author is correctly attributed.

…so I would limit ourselves to those two.

[1] About CC-BY-SA-4.0 ⇒ (A)GPLv3 compatibility:

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8

Good point. That makes sense.

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I just updated the ToS and switched to the CC-By-SA-4.0. Beside that I removed the “Payment and Renewal” section because you are absolutely right that this doesn’t make any sense in context of the Nextcloud forum.

Could you suggest some changes to reflect the correspondig laws in the EU? This would be great!

By the way, great to have you here, @hook :smile:

10

Thanks :gift_heart:

I’m happy to look into it, but am currently a bit busy with finding a job and passing my driving exam.

Thanks! So far it seems like a very friendly community. :smile: