In reply to Richard Sever.

Well I would say that's an ethical question (and I'm no professional ethicist, and this ain't ethics advice). Ultimately its a consent and commitment question for me. I think you're posing the question the wrong way around (and that's why John had such a strong view on it, he's dug deep into this). I'd also note that the Portable Consent work that John's done addresses a lot of the technical barriers to making access control work in these settings.

And to the scientist's being dismayed I'd say stiff. We seem to be getting a few messages to maybe listen a little harder to the concerns of others at the moment, instead of focussing on our own issues.

In terms of licensing yes, the end point of my view is that we should remove legal barriers and use norms to enforce community requirements on eg attribution (and contracts in the limited cases where limiting specific uses is required). That's why this blog is cc0. Not widely know but PLOS almost went with a public domain dedication at the beginning. But it's not now a viable political argument to make at the moment and we've built a good corpus of CC BY and it has limited (but real) interop and scale problems.

The problem with any variant license is that they just don't work. Using copyright to restrict specified uses just fails in practice. It's not the right legal tool. If you must use a variant license then use one of the existing CC ones (they're tested), I guess NC-ND. But probably All Rights Reserved would be a better fit for the aims you have anyway, as it reduces the liability risk (which is a serious issue here, researchers – and possibly the publisher – would be taking on an ill-defined liability in using a (c) license for this).

The historical evidence I'd give is that all of these issues have come up before with software licensing in various forms. A million and one F/OSS licenses grew up creating massive confusion. Today in practice they're mostly gone and there are three or four, and still massive confusion (and people just ignoring them). Bespoke licenses offer some local comfort but rarely succeed at actually addressing the core problem.

Maybe its time for a new post on what (c) licensing can and can't do and the difference between that and what people want it to do...