I'm not sure if you've noticed but we do have Eliezer's large essay "The Simple Truth" available for free so people can try out the service.
There are two different kinds of freedom. People can download "The Simple Truth" from you without paying anything. They however are not free to remix it and create derivative works based on it.
Most of the other blogs we will be partnering with are written by a sole blogger who will want us to use some form of copyright protection.
On your end I don't see a need to license every recording the same way. Specifically it wouldn't cost much to make an experiement. Two channels with similar LessWrong content. At the start ask every author for permission.
One channel gets a closed license the other gets CC-BY-SA. Both get the same price. It would be interesting to know the practical effects. Does the closed license channel sell better? How widely will the CC-BY-SA content get distributed?
If you've been following the announced partnership between LessWrong and Castify, you'll know that we would like to start offering the promoted posts as a podcast.
So far, everything offered by Castify is authored by Eliezer Yudkowsky who gave permission to have his content used. Because promoted posts can be written by those who haven't explicitly given us permission, we're reluctant to offer them without first working through the licensing issues with the community.
What we propose is that all content on the site be subject to the Creative Commons license which would allow content posted to LessWrong to be used for commercial use as long as the work is given proper attribution.
LessWrong management and Castify want feedback from the community before moving forward. Thoughts?
Edit: EricHerboso was kind enough to start a poll in the comments here.