Stack Exchange vs Creative Commons: your brain on private equity

How to slice through content licenses and contract law like a hot knife through butter. A follow up on the Luigi Mangione saga.

This is a follow up to my article “The erasure of Luigi Mangione” where I shine light on Luigi’s treatment on Stack Overflow (a professional site for programmers) which has chosen to keep his contributions but to rename his account removing attribution. The company has since made an official response which I am responding to here.

Want to make the world a better place and share knowledge? Is attribution all you’re looking for? Just want to be recognized for having taken the time, and having spent the effort? Give the Creative Commons licenses a shot. They have a license that demands attribution (CC-BY-SA). But if you want attribution on Stack Exchange, tough shit. This response is from Cesar M a staff moderator on Stack Exchange,

This is the crazy part,

But we do believe resetting the username to the default value to prevent abuse (such as in the cases listed in this post) is within our scope.

By “within our scope” they mean permitted by the content license. The content license is provided by Creative Commons and is effectively a private agreement between Stack Exchange and the contributor (in this case Luigi Mangione). That the specific license is in use is a public matter.

Unrelated to the license, people were upvoting Luigi Mangione and Stack Exchange decided to classify that action as “abuse” (insane in itself) because they felt the upvotes were unearned. Stack Exchange believes that its “abuse” designation has ramifications on the contractual obligation within the license namely “attribution” (which we will address in more detail). With their “abuse” designation applied, they can remove the desired attribution of the contributor and replace it with a default username of its choosing. Bizarre, if you ask me.

Cesar goes on to say in his answer,

We may (but are under no obligation to) reset usernames to their default value for various reasons, such as to uphold our Code of Conduct, Terms of Service, and Acceptable Use Policy, to protect the sites and the integrity of content (see our Inauthentic Usage policy - for example), for legal reasons, and even upon user request.

That is to say, there are a whole slew of things that they’re reserving their perceived right of unattribution for. All the hours you put into generating content and all you get is your name on that content. Stripping that can easily be a loss of thousands of man-hours of honest work.

How to discourage a community

In this context Stack Exchange believes “abuse” is when one contributor upvotes another for reasons they believe are unrelated to the content of the submission. Generally, “abuse” requires a “victim.” If true, in this context the victim is the person who was upvoted or rewarded with a bounty — literally an act which increases their “reputation” and standing in the community at no cost.

There is no way Stack Exchange can know the reasoning for an upvote. But, rather than using gamification to make things fun and engaging, they’ve decided to interpret the game as canon and to make their moderators the equivalent of in-game Judge Dredds to enforce this rule against “abuse.”

The company has lost focus on the community. I don’t know what they’re trying to achieve:

• If I want to contribute content to get magic unicorn points

• and, I want to give away those unicorn points

• And there is another contributor who

  • wants to contribute to get attribution

  • and, wants to receive the points that I’m giving.

They’re in a position of meeting four wants at no cost to their profit-seeking endeavors. But instead, they opt to abandon the course, jump ship, and piss everyone off. What is this dragon that they’re willing to pay such a high price to slay? You navigated from a position of four wins to

• suspended user and top-contributor (that wanted to give points)

• unattributed user (that wanted both attribution and to receive points)

• and, a pissed off community

And that’s the best case scenario for the company where the “abuse” is known. It’s even worse if you found the contributions on a profile page (which Stack Exchange makes available) and found them legitimately worthy of reward or upvote.

How to butcher a license

But, let’s take a look at the license in detail, and the statements from the author Creative Commons. From Creative Commons’s own description on CC-BY-SA 4.0,

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

The web page on Appropriate Credit says,

If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.

While provided by the license creator, the above is colloquial. The actual legal text for CC-BY-SA 4.0 lays out the obligations of Attribution pretty clearly,

Section 3 – License Conditions.

Your exercise of the Licensed Rights is expressly made subject to the following conditions.

1. Attribution

   1. If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:

      1. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:

         1. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);

         2. a copyright notice;

         3. a notice that refers to this Public License;

         4. a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties;

         5. a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;

      2. indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and

      3. indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.

   2. You may satisfy the conditions in Section 3(a)(1) in any reasonable manner based on the medium, means, and context in which You Share the Licensed Material. For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

   3. If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.

However you slice it, there is no allowance — reasonable or not — for “abuse.”

Maybe Stack Exchange has a different view of attribution from their members. If it is their view that the account name isn’t what satisfies the attribution requirements, just be honest and straightforward. Sure, I’ll quit, but that’s the price you pay for refusing to pay the price I charge.

My advice as the most venerated and reputable community member

One solution that would make this all go away would be simple:

1. Allow contributors attribution however they want, subject to FCC guidance. Let the FCC step in shit so you don’t have to. I don’t think there is any standing to subject the CC BY-SA to the FCC guidance. But, I think it would mitigate social blowback when violating the license is otherwise defensible, as in the restricted case of nicknames with racial slurs.

2. Restore Luigi Mangione’s desired attribution.

3. Mark all subsequent emails from agencies affiliated with Biden and Trump as spam.

Removal of attribution isn’t a punishment for “abuse.” And even more so when others are doing the “abuse” and you remove the attribution of the “victim”.

This Stack Exchange interpretation is henceforth immortalized as CC BY-SA-PE: The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Private Equity 4.0 license: they can do what ever they want, and you can fuck right off.