Suggestion: Change all copyright/attribution field
Saturday, June 11, 2016 - 10:16
It would be very useful for someone who has hundreds of uploads to change all of their credit info at once, rather than having to edit each individual contribution one by one. Maybe this is already a feature that I am unaware of, but it would help out a lot if it were possible.
it is technically doable but has the potential for significant performance impact and possible abuse. The admins can already do this kind of bulk content update for a given user, but I would be quite reluctant to open up such broad powers to generial users.
I also don't personally know the legal implications of you changing your attribution details for work which is already in use. It would be good to get some clarity on that. For instance, of you have previously released something as CC0, i don't think it is possible for your to later change that to something more restrictive.
I remember reading on the creative commons websites that the licenses are irrevocable. You can, however; stop issuing new licenses for the work and start issuing them under a different license.
Honestly, I try to only use CC-0 licensed work (except for music), so I don't need to worry about this stuff. I just put things up under CC-0 in return. (I have put over 200 works on open clip art, not as much here as people just don't download it)
I had just made a new Soundcloud to go with my account when I created this topic. I wanted to include my Soundcloud address in the attribution info so people could post a link to my Soundcloud page if they wanted to credit me. At this point, I had already uploaded about 15 songs and I didn't want to edit each one individually to include this new page in the attribution section. Then I thought about someone who may have an unwieldy number of submissions, like 200, and they changed something about how they wanted to be credited for their work. It would be a nightmare to edit all of those and it is more likely they would just give up on the idea. I see how this may not seem like a feature that would be used commonly enough to warrant its implementation, so I can understand if it isn't high on the priority list. No worries either way, I just was interested if anyone else could see the value in it or if they have had the need for it in the past.
All the CC licenses are indeed irrevocable, although the attribution requirement gives the creator some leeway as to how it is to be accomplished. (Although the Creative Commons upstream FAQ will tell you that this shouldn't and can't be abused to force users to do arbitrary and unreasonable things.)
I'm not sure there's ever been any guidance as to what exactly does or should happen when attribution instructions change after the initial publication. My impression is that the spirit of the license doesn't really allow creators to force a modification to a third-party's preexisting or past use of an asset if it was and remains in compliance with the original attribution statement.
That said, even if it's not legally useful, it does seem like some contributors might benefit from being able to mass update certain fields of their own submissions, including the attribution instructions. Perhaps it makes sense to keep an eye on such things, but I personally don't find it very likely that it would be abused for nefarious purposes.
The nefarious purposes are more about the specific technical implementation, it would require exposing Drupal's bulk operations interface, and that functionality is what I am concerned about. It is a powerful tool and is usually reserved for admins, I can certainly see some edge cases that might not end too well. That tool can have a pretty significant performance impact, since you're writing to a lot of tables at once, and exposing it to end users might allow them to easily automate the process to crash the site.
There are other difficulties. In some cases attribution details vary from one piece to another, for instance, and you don't necessarily want it to be trivial to lose that information by overwriting them all with one text.
My off the cuff idea would be to have the option to set up one or more "attribution profiles" or something like that which you could select from a dropdown menu when submitting a piece (or you could just type something in). The profile could then be changed and change all associated gallery entries. But I doubt that would be trivial to do and it's probably not worth the time it would take relative to other changes.
I have made adjustents to my attribution information a couple of times. My impression is that this doesn't have any effect on the permissibility of giving credit as previously specified, but that instead I'm just adding another acceptable method, albeit a preferred one. I don't know if that's accurate but it's my interpretation.