Acceptable Use and Copyright

What sort of agreement do we need to put in place with a person who registers with and contributes content to the site?

Standard thing these days seems to be along the following lines:

  • IT Society and IEEE are providing this website as a service to the IT community
  • Users are subject to acceptable use policy, e.g., no spam, defamation, stalking, illegal activities
  • Users understand that, by posting content (text, images, graphics) they are granting the IT Society the right to serve that content as part of this website.  This requires either that the contributor own copyright to the content or obtain explicit permission to post it on this website from the copyright owner
  • The Society does not screen content for copyright permissions during submission, but will immediately remove any copyright works from the website upon owner request
  • Users in violation of the above are subject to having their content removed and their accounts disabled.

The Society could suggest that users contribute their original content under a Creative Commons license (which one?) so that others in the community can build upon it.

We might have to have IEEE web folks and lawyers review whatever policy we develop.